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Sleeping beauty Bitcoin wallets wake up after 14 years to the tune of $2B
- sugarangela 1y ago[dead]
- ETH_start 1y agoApril 2011 is not Satoshi era. Satoshi had dropped out of public Bitcoin forums by late 2010.
- IncreasePosts 1y agoImagine finding a file on an old laptop from when you were just futzing around 15 years ago. And it was worth $9 billion.
- bravoetch 1y agoIt's not that. These are addresses with 10k BTC each. That's very intentional storage even for 2011.
- bombcar 1y agoWasn’t 10k bitcoin the price of a pizza or something back then?
- qqqult 1y agoBTC ranged between $0.30 and $27 back in 2011 so not quite
- canucker2016 1y ago10K BTC for two Papa John's large pies. see https://marketrealist.com/what-is-the-bitcoin-pizza-transaction-ex2/ https://marketrealist.com/what-is-the-bitcoin-pizza-transact... That's about US$500M per pie these days ( 1BTC ~= US$100K )
- mattlondon 1y agoMaybe that guy who was digging up a landfill to find his old HDD finally found it! Seriously though, what are the odds that someone has been quietly spending 10s/100s of millions in cloud compute to brute force the keys for old wallets?
- bravoetch 1y agoI would say the odds are zero because that's the likelihood of being able to brute-force anything in the key space.
- handfuloflight 1y agoIt's not zero. https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/trophies https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/trophies
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y agoIt's close enough. There are 200 million+ BTC wallets. They've found 54 out of 200 million+ or about 0.00002% of wallets - in how many years?
- handfuloflight 1y agoHow does the equation change with $100m of cloud or GPU compute as GP speculated? These are all hobbyists.
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y agoIt changes that if you attempt to liquidate that much BTC, BTC crashes and you've got 90% less money than you hoped for.
- handfuloflight 1y agoDo you really think they have no notion of liquidity? Why would they attempt to liquidate it all at once?
- coolspot 1y agoSomeone just got out of jail.
- jedberg 1y agoRoss Ulbricht got out a few months ago. Could be his.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- paulpauper 1y agohe only had $40 million . if he had $1 billion the feds would have known about it
- Workaccount2 1y agoAn old friend of mine died 11 years ago from an overdose, and I am almost certain he used darknet markets to buy other drugs. It's very likely there is a wallet forever lost with many Bitcoin in it from his passing. No way his family would have known anything about it (Bitcoin/dark markets)or cared much anyway circa 2014. I'll admit I have pondered ways to check this, but it's too far fetched. I can't help but wonder if the wave of fentanyl that made optiate addict deaths skyrocket, left a huge wake of forever lost Bitcoin. I know there was a lot of overlap between addicts and darknet market users.
- 1y ago
- jedberg 1y agoIf you have $8B in BTC, is there any reasonable way to turn that into any fiat currency? USD, EUR, anything? Can you even buy that much USDC?
- nandomrumber 1y agoLoans using the BTC as collateral. Buy good / commodities with BTC and resell them. Sell the BTC. Probably not all $8 gigadollars at once, but is there any reason you would immediately need that much?
- jedberg 1y ago> but is there any reason you would immediately need that much? Because you worry that BTC will crash and want it in something more stable?
- PoshBreeze 1y agoBTC is volatile but it isn't going to crash tomorrow or any time soon at least not by the amount that would make sense to sell with a wallet this old.
- mindcandy 1y agoCompared to the “Magnificent Seven”, Bitcoin’s volatility has put it in the middle, while it’s performance puts it at or near the top depending on the time window. https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/research-and-insights/closer-look-bitcoins-volatility https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/research-and-insights/... https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/03/06/bitcoin-has-been-a-better-investment-to-own-over-t/ https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/03/06/bitcoin-has-been-a...
- lottin 1y agoI find it odd that someone would make a comparison between bitcoin and other financial assets, as if bitcoin was just another financial asset and its theoretical price wasn't zero... which is a pretty big market anomaly. Normally, when you find a market anomaly, you try to explain it. But these analysts, they pretend that there's no anomaly. They just don't talk about it, in the hopes that nobody will notice.
- p0w3n3d 1y agoF word is what caught my eye first
- duttish 1y agoWhoever got these wallets better sell them and get a good security company on rotation quickly before anyone find out who they are. Seems like wrench attacks been been happening a lot more the last year.
- MarcoZavala 1y ago[dead]
- yieldcrv 1y agolooking at the address types this just looks more like a security rotation to a stronger hashing method
- Marsymars 1y agoI don't really get these; there's not a ton of difference between using a wrench to threaten someone with a bunch of Bitcoin vs using a wrench to threaten someone with a bunch of any other liquid asset that could be used to buy bitcoins.
- andylynch 1y agoBitcoin doesn’t ask questions when you unexpectedly want to make a very large transfer to a new payee. Your banker will.
- paulpauper 1y agoBut exchanges will if you deposit that much, and will freeze your $ if they don't like your response.
- udev4096 1y agoWhy would you even use a central exchange? It makes no sense. The person holding an absurd amount of coins would not be stupid to throw it all away like that
- creatonez 1y ago> Satoshi-era Not true in the slightest. Satoshi was already gone by 2010, and in 2011 there were ~8000 transactions per day from folks outside of Satoshi's circle.
- udev4096 1y agoWhat? Satoshi's last publicly known email was on April, 2011 to Gavin [0], stating the following: "I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure, the press just turns that into a pirate currency angle. Maybe instead make it about the open source project and give more credit to your dev contributors; it helps motivate them." Also, let's not forget, it took BTC ~1.5 years to gain any amount of traction at all. Nakamoto was in for a long run and his sudden disappearance is always going to be mysterious [0] - https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/emails/gavin-andresen/1/#selection-13.1-13.21 https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/emails/gavin-andrese...
- MaxPock 1y agoIt pains me because I learnt about bitcoin way back in 2010 and
- sixQuarks 1y agoI learned about it here, but everyone said it was a scam and not to buy
- CamperBob2 1y agoA superposition of wrong and right if there ever was one.
- SoftTalker 1y agoEasy to kick yourself in retrospect but if we could see the future we'd all be millionaires. AAPL was $0.28 in 2002 (adjusted for splits, something like $12 at the time).
- rasz 1y agoIt is still a scam. Its just that critical mass of delusional people bought into it like Gamestop or Tesla stock. Even super obvious scams like Nikola take years to register price wise.
- rufus_foreman 1y ago[flagged]
- charlieyu1 1y agoI learned about it from my friend, but couldn't bother with downloading a wallet client and mining etc
- pixelpoet 1y ago... and? What is happening with people's attention span?
- throw0101d 1y agoPersonally I think that this can be considered on the "bug" side of Bitcoin's finite number coins: if, over time, they are lost, then there's a smaller quantity† of currency that is useable to actually do stuff with. This can make the 'rate of deflation' that occurs worse: * https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deflationary_spiral https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deflationary_spiral * https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2014/06/the-perils-of-bitcoin-as-currency https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2014/06/the-perils-of-bitcoi... * https://crypto.bi/deflationary/ https://crypto.bi/deflationary/ † I am aware of satoshis.
- serial_dev 1y agoWhen I listen to Bitcoin discussions, one of the advantages people bring up is that there is a limited number of it and you can’t just “print” more. Considering this, while it is true that all this makes deflation worse, I’d assume most bitcoin hodlers would not mind this.
- doublerabbit 1y agoWhat happens when all bitcoin is mined, societal collapse?
- throw0101d 1y ago> When I listen to Bitcoin discussions, one of the advantages people bring up is that there is a limited number of it and you can’t just “print” more. Which can limit economic growth. When money was based the amount of gold available, there were long periods of economic stagnation because of liquidity issues: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine The stagnation only ended when new sources of shiny rocks were found (California; New World). I find it a dumb idea what whether or not people can get credit to start/expand businesses would be dependent of solving math problems. Yes, credit creation can be "too easy" and become a problem, but making it "too hard" (or physically/mathematically impossible) is even more dumb.
- throw0101d 1y agoPerhaps also see the linked page "Top Dormant for 5 years Bitcoin Addresses": * https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-dormant_5y-bitcoin-addresses.html https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-dormant_5y-bitcoin-address...
- jedberg 1y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44466896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44466896
- gnabgib 1y agoDiscussion landed in another thread (74 points, 32 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44466896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44466896
- dzhiurgis 1y agoCan they be spending sidechain coins quietly or is that visible too?
- tromp 1y agoYou can visibly send BTC to the Liquid federated side-chain, where amounts in txs are hidden.
- EGreg 1y agoI have been saying for a decade Satoshi isnt gonna move wallets 1 through 10 But he probably had wallet 55, 182 and 281-290 and has been spending this whole time. Any founder of a crypto project can do that.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- EGreg 1y agoOn a side note, if quantum algorithms break elliptic curve cryptography, then wouldn’t Satoshi’s wallets and others be flooding the market with coin transfers? The BTC network will need to require all addresses with large Bitcoin UTXOs to send them to new wallets, that are quantum-resistant, by a certain date, or lose the ability to move that money.
- notnullorvoid 1y agoSomeone please correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no proof that a general solution to elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem can't be found. It's reasonable to assume that a solution hasn't been found yet though, otherwise that would be the world's best kept secret.
- wmf 1y agoThat's downstream of P vs NP.
- xoralkindi 1y agoShor's algorithm, originally designed for integer factorization, can also be adapted to solve the discrete logarithm problem in polynomial time on a quantum computer. There is also the less efficient Grover's algorithm can also be used for unstructured search problems on a quantum computer.
- notnullorvoid 1y agoI was thinking more along the lines of solving in polynomial time on a conventional computer.
- bix6 1y agoWhere did they transfer them? I see fck in a few lol.
- barkingcat 1y agoProbably North Korea.
- paulpauper 1y agoPrice is dumping today, i wonder how much of a role this is playing. those coins will be hitting an exchange likely. This has always been the problem with bitcoin.. the implicit assumption is that many coins are lost , but if the early adopters start cashing out, prices will fall fast. Institutional buying and retail is still small relative to the early adopters. There are many people , miners who are quietly siting on huge fortunes.
- Scoundreller 1y agoAnd it’s a major US holiday, whatever that indicates.
- alecsm 1y agoI wish I had access to my old wallet. I mined around 1.5BTC with my laptop and I deleted the wallet after a while because it was worthless.
- paulpauper 1y agoyou probably would have sold it at $100 or something anyway
- freedomben 1y agoYep. I used to pay my Dish Network bill with BTC. Youth is wasted on the young and hindsight is 20/20
- twright 1y agoThis is definitely something I remind myself of for any investment I sell and later on explodes. For bitcoin there were way too many highs that I definitely would have sold at.
- alecsm 1y agoI know, that's why I'd like to have the wallet now :) Even if BTC hits 1 million in the future, 150k now would be life changing.
- userbinator 1y agoI think many others, including me, have also the same experience of mining a few and then either forgetting or deleting them because they thought it'd never turn out to be worth anything.
- qingcharles 1y agoSame. I mined 32 BTC circa ~2010-2011. Then I did a clean install and forgot I had everything saved on the HDD and nothing written down. I remember them being worth about $1 a pop at the time and thought "fuck it", but I never bothered minting any more.
- 1y ago
- andy99 1y agoMost interesting to me is that people are worried about a $2B transaction moving the market. How does that compare to the market depth of actual currencies or commodities? BTC, being objectively worthless, must be much more sensitive to people wanting to sell I'd expect.
- bboygravity 1y agoHow is BTC objectively worthless (I'm guessing you mean "intrinsicly worthlesss"?) as opposed to USD or other major currencies?
- anothernewdude 1y agoOther currencies get their value because the governments that provide them make people pay taxes. If you want to pay the tax the US government charges you, you're going to need some USD - so there's guaranteed demand, and hence intrinsic worth. There's also other debt that the US government provides in USD - which provides value as well, in the form of bonds. BTC has no such driver of wealth. Except perhaps money laundering/transfers without AML provisions.
- nwienert 1y agoPeople value a way to store money securely in a place that can’t be physically robbed, that can be sent internationally with low fees quickly. You don’t need anything else. For years the haters on here would screech “but it’s volatile” - not really anymore. I wonder what they’ll decide to hate it for now, rather than changing priors.
- FabHK 1y agoAccording to your theory, all the thousands of shitcoins are valuable. But they're not. There must be further reasons, then, that the price of Bitcoin is so high. And they're purely sentiment, I'd argue. If that changes, there's little to prevent the price from going down very far very fast. Unlike fiat.
- dofubej 1y ago[dead]
- cedws 1y agoI really wonder if Satoshi’s fortune is gone forever. Maybe the CIA found his real identity and uncovered his keys. Dumping that much BTC on the market would crash the market and probably even tank other financial markets.
- changoplatanero 1y agoWhy would the cia want to crash the market?
- ekianjo 1y agothe CIA actively relies on many means, including BTC, to organize their activities.
- swarnie 1y agoWhy would they throw a dozen South American coups, import tonnes of crack to the inner cities, conduct illegal human experimentation or attempt the assassination of multiple democratically elected world leaders? Honestly no idea, they seem a little fash-y for any logical reasoning that i can comprehend. Maybe they had another insurgency to fund and didn't want it going through the vast ^official^ books?
- wmf 1y agoMy theory was always that Satoshi burned the coins from the beginning. There never was any fortune.
- amjnsx 1y agoI see it as the ultimate honeypot. If those coins haven’t moved yet the network is secure.
- monster_truck 1y agoI think you mean canary. Honeypots are decoys by definition
- msgodel 1y agoIs this why Martin Shkreli quit streaming? Did he actually crack them?
- fusionadvocate 1y agoQuantum shorts got to him first.
- ProllyInfamous 1y agoTrivia: there are only five publicly-traded companies with marketcaps larger than bitcoin's: nVidia Microsoft Apple Amazon Google BTC's marketcap is also larger than all the silver in the world...
- wredcoll 1y agoWait til you see the market cap of the shitcoin I just released!
- dsp_person 1y agoJust a hair under google, it crossed earlier this week I think. This list is fun to look at https://8marketcap.com https://8marketcap.com
- ProllyInfamous 1y ago[flagged]
- FabHK 1y agoThough their market cap is somewhat meaningful, and reflective of some value created (flawed as that measure may be). Unlike Bitcoin.
- globular-toast 1y agoBitcoin (capital B) is valuable. An individual BTC is not, but that's true of any currency. We can argue until the cows come home about how valuable these things really are. Speculation in these markets makes it too difficult to judge. People will bet on these things not because they are delivering lots of value to us right now or in the future, but just because they think they'll still be around in the future. That gives monopolists like the ones above the advantage, regardless of value delivered.
- bravesoul2 1y agoMight be the Pizza guy! The other thing they may have a small fortune in forked coins too. Like Bitcoin Cash.
- m3kw9 1y agoThe guy found his hd at the dump?
- smeeger 1y agowhy did i not mine bitcoin in 2010? fuck
- rexpop 1y agoBecause it's a stupid waste of resources, and you had better things to do.
- morkalork 1y ago[flagged]
- qingcharles 1y ago[flagged]
- arthurcolle 1y agoImagine you have one of these addresses precomputed and you see it in a flashed alert Do you sweep to a new address or what? EDIT: Hypothetically, not running on Majorana-2
- jrm4 1y ago[flagged]
- HeartStrings 1y agoWhy is Heart not in jail? Is he in Belarus?
- jrm4 1y agoBecause there's no real case against him AFAIK? Again, from here it really looks like "what can we throw at this incredibly rich person?"
- HeartStrings 1y agoHe is scammer and scammed with origin address.
- HeartStrings 1y agoChinese quantum computer just broke Bitcoin address.
- rlt 1y agoWhat makes you think that?
- udev4096 1y agoThey successfully broke 22 bit RSA [0], which is definitely something to worry about [0] - https://www.earth.com/news/china-breaks-rsa-encryption-with-a-quantum-computer-threatening-global-data-security/ https://www.earth.com/news/china-breaks-rsa-encryption-with-...
- Synaesthesia 1y agoI was also around when bitcoin just started out. Many people wanted it to be a global revolution in finance. But instead it turned into a game of "hodl" to get rich. Scams were openly perpetrated in the forums. I became completely disillusioned. What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today?
- la_fayette 1y ago> What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today? It is a highly reliable, global-scale P2P software system, we can analyse, experiment with and learn from.
- dovys 1y agoSpeculation, get rich quick schemes and scams. They will exist no matter what. At least the barrier to entry to get scammed is higher with crypto than just online payments
- Synaesthesia 1y agoNo, scamming people is much easier with crypto. The transactions are irreversible, for one.
- akritrime 1y agoAs it is with cash.
- r33b33 1y agoAh yes, the dreaded Chinese Quantum Stealth attack.
- dandanua 1y agoHm, I can't recall when The Sleeping Beauty was making billions of dark money. This is some perverted fairy tale. The sleeping beauty is our current world, that allow all the scams, launderings, murderings to happen.
- ur-whale 1y agoI find it amazing how much these type of tech articles exert themselves to systematically avoid posting any materially useful information. Do you see a BTC address in there? A link to blockchair? Did I somehow miss it? In fact, I've noticed that this is a systematic trend, not just with cryptos. Most tech. journalists systematically talk about stuff without ever posting relevant links to the actual event.
- sizzle 1y agoI remember getting a slick new GPU card and learned about Bitcoin mining with my idle gpu power to collect these Bitcoin worth cents, like collecting soda cans for recycling type of $ and thought it wad a terrible waste of my idle processing power compared to harnessing my idle gpu for the noble cause folding proteins at foldingathome.org I downloaded the bitcoin mining client and everything to see how it worked and had some faucets slipping me Bitcoin for free…
- yahoozoo 1y agotfw when you spent many Bitcoin on Silk Road back when it was only $8 a coin
- ksynwa 1y agoSomeone who is involved in crptocurrency explain this to me. If I was this person, could I just sell these bitcoins today and get something like $2B in cash? Or is it more complicated than that?
- janandonly 1y agoYes. Although selling all at once on a small exchange will not give you the best price. Better to sell lump sum. Or call them to make an over-the-counter deal. A lot of ETF companies like Blackrock get their coins that way.
- bookerjt 1y agoThink about it: for you to collect your $2b someone has to be willing to give it to you and believe they will get it back in the future by buying your bitcoin. Who would do that? Then you just magically deposit $2b into your bank account? Riiiight. That’ll set off epic levels of warning lights and in the US the feds would be up your ass instantly. I bet it’s a freaking nightmare to sell off that much btc.
- Kate5477 1y ago[dead]
- Kate5477 1y ago[dead]
- autin 1y ago[flagged]
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