According to blockchain analytics platform Lookonchain, a miner wallet woke up on Thursday after being dormant for a whopping 14 years.
The address deposited 50 BTC (roughly $3.05 million) to the Binance exchange.
These coins were a mining reward that was received on July 14, 2010.
Transfers from wallets that date back all the way to 2010 are quite rare. In April, 50 BTC that was earned from mining on Apr 23, 2010, was also moved for the first time in 14 years. A similar transaction also took place in March, according to Lookonchain.
Alex DovbnyaIt is worth noting that the largest cryptocurrency was trading below the $1 mark back in 2010. Bitcoin only managed to surpass the aforementioned level in February. In June 2011, its price peaked at $30. At press time, the cryptocurrency is trading at $61,040.
Some social media commentators have already suggested that the recent transfer might be related to Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of the leading cryptocurrency. However, he was not the only whale mining the cryptocurrency back then. Despite the fact the network was still in its earliest days, it had quite a few participants who collectively mined a whopping 3.39 million coins that year.
In 2010, there was no dedicated mining hardware, which means that some geeks could mine the cryptocurrency with the help of ordinary computers. However, as more users started joining the network, mining difficulty started to increase. On July 16, 2010, for instance, mining difficulty quadrupled after an article about the original cryptocurrency was published on Slashdot, a popular website for nerds.
Rare transfers from long-dormant wallets now remind the Bitcoin community about the long-gone era of CPU mining.
Valeria Blokhina
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov