Yesterday, three old Bitcoin whale wallets moved 6,500 BTC.
These were three addresses that had not been active since 5 November 2017, which was during the hot phase of the penultimate big bullrun. They had been inactive since then.
The BTC moved yesterday in total would be worth about $230 million.
Who are the whales of the reactivated Bitcoin wallets?
The identity of these whales is unknown.
What is known, however, is that the first Bitcoins received date as far back as July 2011, when a BTC was worth only $13.5.
Those BTC came from an address marked as belonging to the F2Pool mining pool, so they could be miners.
Bitcoin mining was started on January 3, 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto, who then disappeared forever after April 2011.
So these should not be addresses belonging to Nakamoto, partly because Satoshi never moved any of the BTC he mined, as far as is known.
The fact that these miners started in July 2011, and probably stopped in November 2017 when the price had risen to $7,800, really seems to suggest that these may be miners who have cashed in a lot in the past.
Then again, in 2011 mining was still easy, and the premium was still 50 BTC per mined block.
All it took to cash in on 6,500 BTC was to mine 130 blocks, and since one was being mined every ten minutes even then (about 144 per day), with the low competition there was not at all difficult to mine 130 BTC in six years.
What is surprising is that in November 2017 they stopped, but at that point on the one hand undermining had become much more difficult because of huge competition, while on the other hand they could sell at a high price the BTC they had cashed in and put aside a good nest egg.
The fact that they moved 6,500 yesterday suggests that they actually have many more in their portfolio.
The F2Pool mining pool
F2Pool is still one of the leading Bitcoin mining pools in the world.
In the past seven days it was the third largest pool to mine the most blocks ever (13.4%), behind only Foundry USA Pool (27.3%) and especially the famous AntPool (27.9%) that has long dominated this ranking.
However, it appears to have been created in 2013, so it cannot have sent BTC in 2011.
However, the three addresses that moved the 6,500 BTC yesterday received their first BTC from addresses that appear to belong to F2Pool, which makes one suspect that since they could not have come from the pool, which was created only two years later,they came from those who created that pool.
Then again, in 2011, pools did not even exist, because it was possible to mine solo, given the low competition. It was precisely with the emergence of pools that the competition soared.
F2Pool is a Chinese pool, and it was founded by a few Chinese miners who got together to maximize the odds of validating blocks.
At this point one imagines that the whales who moved 6,500 BTC yesterday may be connected to the Chinese miners who founded F2Pool. Yesterday’s transfer however occurred when it was now nighttime in China and late morning in the US.
What will happen to those BTC?
It is not yet even clear exactly to whom those BTCs were sent.
They may have been sent to exchanges to be sold, but they may also just have been moved to other, perhaps newer (SegWit) or more secure wallets.
Certainly there are no reports of large sales of Bitcoin on the crypto markets after that move, and indeed shortly thereafter the price began to rise from $34,500 to $35,600.
Given that these are BTC held on proprietary wallets for so many years, it would seem odd that they were moved to exchanges to be held there.
So since they do not appear to have been sold, it is possible to imagine that perhaps they were not transferred to exchanges.
Also given that the addresses that were inactive as of 2017 were legacy addresses, i.e., old type, the assumption that they were transferred to new SegWit addresses is probably the one to consider most.