On 10 August at 3:45 PM (CEST), the price of bitcoin is $45,537 and suddenly a few minutes later a dormant Bitcoin wallet, which had been inactive for a long time and dated back to the “Satoshi Era”, was reactivated.
Whale Alert, a popular Twitter bot account that tracks large on-chain transactions, posted a tweet announcing that the wallet was activated after more than 11 years.
The address, which therefore dates back to the Satoshi Era, contains 50 BTC worth $2.305 million, at the current value of the digital asset.
“Satoshi era” refers to those coins mined when Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, was still communicating with the crypto world, hence it is the period between 2009 and 2011.
Similarly, in February and March 2021, almost 5,000 BTC and 2,000 BTC were activated from different Satoshi-era wallets.
The price of BTC subsequently fell to $44,670 when the tweet quickly went viral, only to rise again to $46,126, peaking in the last 24 hours at $46,583,000.
How was the Bitcoin wallet of the Satoshi Era reactivated?
Although the activation may not have a direct impact on the value of Bitcoin, the exchange rate will most likely fluctuate. If the current owner of the “awakened” wallet decides to sell BTC at the current price, the impact may be felt by holders in the short term.
From the comments underneath the Whale Alert post, we can see that some users believe that it was just a lucky recovery of an old and almost forgotten password while others think that an external party managed to brute-force the private key of this wallet.
Some commentators point out the huge difference in the value of Bitcoin in 2010 compared to today, pointing out that in May 2010 a BTC cost only $0.041 and therefore a wallet of 50 BTC was worth about $2.
