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Whatever other effect this has, it's likely to put bitcoin back in the mainstream news. "Has Satoshi come back from the dead?" "Who would waste a million dollar

Whatever other effect this has, it's likely to put bitcoin back in the mainstream news. "Has Satoshi come back from the dead?" "Who would waste a million dollars?" People love mystery and high stakes. Not sure who actually profits from this, but I assume it would be someone holding a lot more than that and looking to offload. EDIT: Deleted a mysterious appearance of the word "sometime" (...did Satoshi put it there?)

Zetobal 3y ago
Yeah, living in reality is just too boring atm better dream up some shitty conspiracy to manipulate the crypto market. Hilarious.
- akoboldfrying 3y ago
  So what's your theory?
  - andrewinardeer 3y ago
    Had the incorrect wallet in their device's memory, pasted and hit send without triple checking. Rookie error.
    - ur-whale 3y ago
      > Rookie error. You're obviously working under the assumption that the sender is someone for whom one more or one less MUSD makes any kind of difference to his everyday life.
    - akoboldfrying 3y ago
      I think even the richest people on earth will take the time to double-check a million-dollar transaction. For someone to have done this accidentally and not bothered to double-check, it seems to me they would need to have fat-fingered both the address and the amount. This person is typing with hams.
      - jorvi 3y ago
        For people with say 10 billion dollars, losing a million is losing 1 / 10 000 of their wealth. It’s as if you have 10 000 dollars in savings and lose 1 dollar in the couch cushions. Plus that wealth is generating more wealth. Logically, a multi-billionaire wouldn’t care.
        epolanski 3y ago
        That's nonsense, not only the "it's like 10/15$ for me and you" argument quite weak, because ordinary people tend to pay attention to the addresses they send money to (regardless of amount), but people don't get rich nor stay rich by not caring about their spending either.
      - zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
        This guy swapped over $600k and didn't check the slippage and lost over $200k on it https://forum.osmosis.zone/t/refund-dydx-user-funds-lost-from-high-price-impact-out-of-protorev-profits/1088 https://forum.osmosis.zone/t/refund-dydx-user-funds-lost-fro...
    - quintushoratius 3y ago
      Doubtful. Almost any other wallet seems possible, but Satoshi's wallet isn't one that you would randomly have copied moments before making a million dollar transaction.
    - mensetmanusman 3y ago
      bitcoin wallets would not be different by just a single character.
    - latchkey 3y ago
      With binance, you have to double check the withdraw address, especially for something large like this. I'm surprised their own processes didn't flag it.
      - baking 3y ago
        It was not directly from Binance. It went into an intermediate wallet first.
- hnlmorg 3y ago
  What the OP is describing is basically just a pump-and-dump scheme. Which is particularly common in the crypto world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump
  - werediver 3y ago
    If the receiving wallet is truly dead, the "dump" part of the scheme is impossible, which makes the scheme non-profitable.
    - b4ke 3y ago
      Profit is the motivation of human endeavor…. Maybe we aren’t alone, it is as it will. Now my wife’s musings about crypto dog yesterday are far more meaningful.
    - akoboldfrying 3y ago
      Well, I'm speculating that the $1M is just a (massively expensive) gambit to get the public interested in bitcoin again and lead to a "pump". The "dump" would then involve the even larger amounts that the person in question would have to be holding (for this scheme to even remotely make sense).
    - hnlmorg 3y ago
      The OPs point was this the "pump" part (ie get people talking about Bitcoin again). If their theory is true (and I'm not saying I believe it is), then the dump part wouldn't be transferring to another wallet, it would be selling their remaining Bitcoin. If this is a pump and dump scheme (and that's a big "if") then they would need an order of magnitude more than 27BTC (ie the amount they sent to this wallet) for this to work.
      - Thorrez 3y ago
        Potentially even better than selling their remaining bitcoins is buying options right before doing this pump.
    - 3y ago
jtxx 3y ago
re: who profits from this, got me thinking - even though $1m is a drop in the bucket of the market cap, could burning that amount of funds have any meaningful effect on the price? since the time of this transaction, prices have gone up 1.5% which is not huuuugely significant and causation != correlation I think the hacked whale account makes most sense to me tho
- lobsterthief 3y ago
  Given the market cap of Bitcoin, it would not have a measurable effect simply to shrink the supply by $1M.
  - krisoft 3y ago
    Does that also include the publicity? If the media takes notice and talks about bitcoin, couldn’t that make more people buy and thus drive up the price? I’m willing to admit that it is a bit 6 dimensional chess explanation.
    - Sebb767 3y ago
      Even assuming that this would increase the price by 5% (which did not happen and would be quite a stretch goal), the sender would have needed to trade in over 20 million USD just to break even. People have bet money on stupider ventures, sure, but the risk and required capital to even hope to make money make this explanation not likely in my eyes.
janmo 3y ago
It could also be that the founds are somehow related to illegal activities and this is just a way to get rid of them. Remember how hard it was for the Bitfinex hackers to launder their Bitcoins. This is pretty much a proof of burn, it proves that X person has no longer access to these coins.
- uxp8u61q 3y ago
  How would this help that hypothetical person in any way? If the coins are stolen, then the victim will want the money back. They won't care if the "same" coins are given back or not. Money is fungible. If someone steals a $10 bill from you and burns it, are you going to forsake your claim to $10? I bet you'd even be happy to get two $5 bills back rather than nothing.
  - janmo 3y ago
    It proves that you destroyed X coins. Example, with the Bitfinex hack, about 120k Bitcoins were stolen, but they were blacklisted and unspendable even on the darknet. So the hypothetical hacker could try to negotiate returning x percent of the coins if he is let go with the rest. Burning coins could prove that he means business, and that he could just burn the entire 120k Bitcoins. There must be something going on behind the scenes.
    - akoboldfrying 3y ago
      I'm trying to see a way for burning the coins to be useful in some way, but I'm not yet seeing it in your scenario. If it were the case that there had been a theft, and the thief wanted to be able to spend a fraction of what they stole (instead of get it all blacklisted), wouldn't the deal involve sending the remaining fraction back to the original owners? If you steal something from me, I'm interested in getting (at least some fraction of) that thing back, not in you provably destroying some fraction of it.
      - themoonisachees 3y ago
        I think in this scenario they would be burning coins as bank robbers would execute a hostage. Not sure how the binance source address plays into this theory though.
WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
If nobody knows what "Satoshi" is, it could be a person, it could also be an agency, it could also probably be the NSA, or perhaps the FED https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency... https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/884 https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/884 https://www.tsa.gov/digital-id https://www.tsa.gov/digital-id If that's a governmental agency, it's perhaps to - crowdfund the development of multiple technologies - harden the security by allowing people to make money (to attract evil entities) - mainstream the idea of a digital wallet/identity The "bottom up" psyop
- wlonkly 3y ago
  People know who Satoshi is or was, in that it's the same Satoshi that invented Bitcoin. (But nobody knows who that is or was "in real life".) But if an agency has access to that wallet, then any transactions would be visible to everybody. Activity on Satoshi's wallet after all this time would shake up the Bitcoin world pretty hard. I don't know how sudden activity on this known-inactive wallet would accomplish any of those things.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  BTC is trackable. How would the NSA use $41B when everyone in the world could see where and when it moved? And if the Fed had it, why would they sit on it and not say anything? the whole point of the Fed is stability, and sitting on unstable currency -- which would get even move volatile if people found out about their hidden supply -- would be a waste of time. nothing but conspiracy mongering bunkum here
  - WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
    https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyp7vw/the-cia-is-deep-into-cryptocurrency-director-reveals https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyp7vw/the-cia-is-deep-into-... https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci... https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies-on-international-bank-transactions-a-922430.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies... Many reason to believe the NSA would be behind the digital crypto currency fad, they need the tech, and it needs to be as secure as possible To me this sounds more plausible than the "a random dude from SF" theory
oskarkk 3y ago
> "Has Satoshi come back from the dead?" I think Satoshi coming back from the dead would totally tank the price, as he owns something like 5% of all BTC ever mined (~$43b).

Zetobal 3y ago

Yeah, living in reality is just too boring atm better dream up some shitty conspiracy to manipulate the crypto market. Hilarious.

akoboldfrying 3y ago
So what's your theory?
- andrewinardeer 3y ago
  Had the incorrect wallet in their device's memory, pasted and hit send without triple checking. Rookie error.
  - ur-whale 3y ago
    > Rookie error. You're obviously working under the assumption that the sender is someone for whom one more or one less MUSD makes any kind of difference to his everyday life.
  - akoboldfrying 3y ago
    I think even the richest people on earth will take the time to double-check a million-dollar transaction. For someone to have done this accidentally and not bothered to double-check, it seems to me they would need to have fat-fingered both the address and the amount. This person is typing with hams.
    - jorvi 3y ago
      For people with say 10 billion dollars, losing a million is losing 1 / 10 000 of their wealth. It’s as if you have 10 000 dollars in savings and lose 1 dollar in the couch cushions. Plus that wealth is generating more wealth. Logically, a multi-billionaire wouldn’t care.
      - epolanski 3y ago
        That's nonsense, not only the "it's like 10/15$ for me and you" argument quite weak, because ordinary people tend to pay attention to the addresses they send money to (regardless of amount), but people don't get rich nor stay rich by not caring about their spending either.
    - zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
      This guy swapped over $600k and didn't check the slippage and lost over $200k on it https://forum.osmosis.zone/t/refund-dydx-user-funds-lost-from-high-price-impact-out-of-protorev-profits/1088 https://forum.osmosis.zone/t/refund-dydx-user-funds-lost-fro...
  - quintushoratius 3y ago
    Doubtful. Almost any other wallet seems possible, but Satoshi's wallet isn't one that you would randomly have copied moments before making a million dollar transaction.
  - mensetmanusman 3y ago
    bitcoin wallets would not be different by just a single character.
  - latchkey 3y ago
    With binance, you have to double check the withdraw address, especially for something large like this. I'm surprised their own processes didn't flag it.
    - baking 3y ago
      It was not directly from Binance. It went into an intermediate wallet first.
hnlmorg 3y ago
What the OP is describing is basically just a pump-and-dump scheme. Which is particularly common in the crypto world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump
- werediver 3y ago
  If the receiving wallet is truly dead, the "dump" part of the scheme is impossible, which makes the scheme non-profitable.
  - b4ke 3y ago
    Profit is the motivation of human endeavor…. Maybe we aren’t alone, it is as it will. Now my wife’s musings about crypto dog yesterday are far more meaningful.
  - akoboldfrying 3y ago
    Well, I'm speculating that the $1M is just a (massively expensive) gambit to get the public interested in bitcoin again and lead to a "pump". The "dump" would then involve the even larger amounts that the person in question would have to be holding (for this scheme to even remotely make sense).
  - hnlmorg 3y ago
    The OPs point was this the "pump" part (ie get people talking about Bitcoin again). If their theory is true (and I'm not saying I believe it is), then the dump part wouldn't be transferring to another wallet, it would be selling their remaining Bitcoin. If this is a pump and dump scheme (and that's a big "if") then they would need an order of magnitude more than 27BTC (ie the amount they sent to this wallet) for this to work.
    - Thorrez 3y ago
      Potentially even better than selling their remaining bitcoins is buying options right before doing this pump.
  - 3y ago

jtxx 3y ago

re: who profits from this, got me thinking - even though $1m is a drop in the bucket of the market cap, could burning that amount of funds have any meaningful effect on the price? since the time of this transaction, prices have gone up 1.5% which is not huuuugely significant and causation != correlation I think the hacked whale account makes most sense to me tho

lobsterthief 3y ago
Given the market cap of Bitcoin, it would not have a measurable effect simply to shrink the supply by $1M.
- krisoft 3y ago
  Does that also include the publicity? If the media takes notice and talks about bitcoin, couldn’t that make more people buy and thus drive up the price? I’m willing to admit that it is a bit 6 dimensional chess explanation.
  - Sebb767 3y ago
    Even assuming that this would increase the price by 5% (which did not happen and would be quite a stretch goal), the sender would have needed to trade in over 20 million USD just to break even. People have bet money on stupider ventures, sure, but the risk and required capital to even hope to make money make this explanation not likely in my eyes.

janmo 3y ago

It could also be that the founds are somehow related to illegal activities and this is just a way to get rid of them. Remember how hard it was for the Bitfinex hackers to launder their Bitcoins. This is pretty much a proof of burn, it proves that X person has no longer access to these coins.

uxp8u61q 3y ago
How would this help that hypothetical person in any way? If the coins are stolen, then the victim will want the money back. They won't care if the "same" coins are given back or not. Money is fungible. If someone steals a $10 bill from you and burns it, are you going to forsake your claim to $10? I bet you'd even be happy to get two $5 bills back rather than nothing.
- janmo 3y ago
  It proves that you destroyed X coins. Example, with the Bitfinex hack, about 120k Bitcoins were stolen, but they were blacklisted and unspendable even on the darknet. So the hypothetical hacker could try to negotiate returning x percent of the coins if he is let go with the rest. Burning coins could prove that he means business, and that he could just burn the entire 120k Bitcoins. There must be something going on behind the scenes.
  - akoboldfrying 3y ago
    I'm trying to see a way for burning the coins to be useful in some way, but I'm not yet seeing it in your scenario. If it were the case that there had been a theft, and the thief wanted to be able to spend a fraction of what they stole (instead of get it all blacklisted), wouldn't the deal involve sending the remaining fraction back to the original owners? If you steal something from me, I'm interested in getting (at least some fraction of) that thing back, not in you provably destroying some fraction of it.
    - themoonisachees 3y ago
      I think in this scenario they would be burning coins as bank robbers would execute a hostage. Not sure how the binance source address plays into this theory though.

WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago

If nobody knows what "Satoshi" is, it could be a person, it could also be an agency, it could also probably be the NSA, or perhaps the FED https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency... https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/884 https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/884 https://www.tsa.gov/digital-id https://www.tsa.gov/digital-id If that's a governmental agency, it's perhaps to - crowdfund the development of multiple technologies - harden the security by allowing people to make money (to attract evil entities) - mainstream the idea of a digital wallet/identity The "bottom up" psyop

wlonkly 3y ago
People know who Satoshi is or was, in that it's the same Satoshi that invented Bitcoin. (But nobody knows who that is or was "in real life".) But if an agency has access to that wallet, then any transactions would be visible to everybody. Activity on Satoshi's wallet after all this time would shake up the Bitcoin world pretty hard. I don't know how sudden activity on this known-inactive wallet would accomplish any of those things.
red-iron-pine 3y ago
BTC is trackable. How would the NSA use $41B when everyone in the world could see where and when it moved? And if the Fed had it, why would they sit on it and not say anything? the whole point of the Fed is stability, and sitting on unstable currency -- which would get even move volatile if people found out about their hidden supply -- would be a waste of time. nothing but conspiracy mongering bunkum here
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
  https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyp7vw/the-cia-is-deep-into-cryptocurrency-director-reveals https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyp7vw/the-cia-is-deep-into-... https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci... https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies-on-international-bank-transactions-a-922430.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies... Many reason to believe the NSA would be behind the digital crypto currency fad, they need the tech, and it needs to be as secure as possible To me this sounds more plausible than the "a random dude from SF" theory

oskarkk 3y ago

> "Has Satoshi come back from the dead?" I think Satoshi coming back from the dead would totally tank the price, as he owns something like 5% of all BTC ever mined (~$43b).