A few days ago, someone sent about 27 BTC to Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin wallet.
The transaction took place on Friday, January 5, 2024, when those 26.9 BTC were worth nearly 1.2 million dollars.
Summary
Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin wallet
Satoshi Nakamoto is the creator of Bitcoin.
After publishing the Bitcoin whitepaper on October 31, 2008, he started working on creating the Bitcoin v0.1 software, which was made public on February 11, 2009.
In the meantime, he had already tested it, in particular by mining the first block of the Bitcoin blockchain on January 3, 2009, the so-called genesis block.
So it is certain that the zero block of the Bitcoin blockchain was mined by Satoshi Nakamoto himself, and since in that block there is only one “transaction”, namely the coinbase with which Satoshi created the first 50 BTC in history by sending them to his own address, it is also certain that the only public address present in that block is Satoshi’s first address.
Note that Nakamoto later mined thousands of other blocks, always using a different address.
The most curious thing of all, however, is that Satoshi has never moved BTC from his known addresses, except in very rare exceptions.
Someone managed to estimate what his public addresses are, and upon verification it is discovered that practically all of them still have at least 50 BTC from the coinbase – the reward for miners was reduced to 25 BTC only in November 2021, when Satoshi had already been missing for over a year.
Satoshi’s first address
In particular, the first address of Satoshi Nakamoto, which was used for the coinbase of the first block and undoubtedly belongs to Satoshi without a shadow of a doubt, now holds almost 99.7 BTC, nearly double the initial value.
The fact is that since Satoshi disappeared without touching his Bitcoin, many people send BTC to his genesis block address, effectively burning them.
From a strictly technical point of view, it is not a true burn, since it is not possible to exclude either that Satoshi is dead or that the private keys of that address have been lost. But since in over 15 years no BTC or Satoshi has ever left that address, it is currently believed that sending BTC to that address is equivalent to burning them.
Over the years, many thousands of transactions have been sent to that address, although often for very small amounts. Those 99.7 BTC held at that address can now be considered lost in every respect.
It should also be remembered that overall there would be more than 1.1 million BTC in Satoshi’s addresses.
The transaction on Friday to Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin wallet
Out of those 99.7 BTC, approximately 27 were received on Friday, January 5, 2024.
The reason for that shipment is unknown, and some speculate that it could even be an extremely expensive mistake.
In fact, although sending BTC to Satoshi’s first address effectively means burning them, the impact on the circulating supply of 49.7 BTC (the existing 99.7 minus the initial 50 mined by Satoshi) is almost negligible, given that there are more than 19.5 million Bitcoins in total.
So, what would be the need to burn 26.9 BTC?
For this reason, the hypothesis circulating is that of an error, but there is also a real mystery.
The address that made that submission is indeed linked to Binance.
This is an address that has only two large transactions, of equal amount, both occurred on the same Friday.
Or rather, on Friday that address linked to Binance first received 26.9 BTC, and then less than an hour later sent them all to Satoshi’s first address effectively burning them.
The role of Binance
It seems unlikely that Binance is the true perpetrator of that sending.
The hypothesis is that the 26.9 BTC received from that address were received from Binance, since they come from different addresses probably belonging to the exchange.
This does not mean at all that the sending to Satoshi’s first address was done by Binance, but it suggests that the BTC sent to Satoshi were purchased on Binance and then withdrawn.
In theory, the exchange should be able to know who made that withdrawal, also because for those amounts the KYC should be mandatory.
Someone suggests that behind that transaction there could be Craig Wright, the self-proclaimed Satoshi, but it wouldn’t be clear why.
The fact is that this is the largest amount ever sent to Satoshi’s first address, since the initial 50 BTC is not a transaction but the reward for mining the block.
The mystery is therefore thick, although the hypothesis of an error seems to be the most capable of explaining what happened. In that case, the author of that error would have lost more than a million dollars just for using a different address than the intended one. It should be remembered that on-chain BTC transactions are absolutely irreversible, so only Satoshi Nakamoto himself could return them to him.
