A Mysterious $1.2 Million Bitcoin Transaction to Satoshi Nakamoto Raises Speculations

An unusually big transaction in BTC tokens occurred on the 5^th of January, 2024. The wallet that received the massive payout is the same address that mined Bitcoin’s first-ever block reward. Just as a reminder, it’s been 15 years since Bitcoin appeared and started a revolution in the financial market.

What’s Mysterious About This Big Bitcoin Transaction?

The large Bitcoin payout made last Friday was transferred to the same address that pseudonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto was using. This left traders and crypto enthusiasts baffled as many of them are speculating about the intention of these crypto transfers.

Arkham Intelligence shows an unidentified crypto wallet sending 27 BTC (worth $1.17 million) on the 5^th of January. The receiving account was the first-ever Bitcoin address that belonged to Nakamoto.

Satoshi Nakamoto used the same Bitcoin address to mine the Bitcoin network’s inaugural “genesis” block on the 3^rd of January, 2009. According to the data provided by Blockchain.com, this account still contains the first-ever 50 BTC reward.

After the payout this Friday, this address now holds nearly 100 BTC, which is worth $4.6 million at the moment. To make things even more interesting, the transaction occurred only 2 days after the anniversary of the beginning of the Bitcoin network.

Some users are sending pittances from time to time to this long-dormant genesis wallet. They do this as a commemoration of the start of the most popular crypto network.

The Speculations Regarding This Massive Bitcoin Transaction

As one might guess, this big Bitcoin transaction triggered many speculations about what could have been the purpose of this payment.

The director of Coinbase, Conor Grogan, had his say on the X platform. He is looking into 2 theories. One is the creator waking up and deciding to buy 27 BTC from Binance and depositing them into their wallet. As for the other theory, he doesn’t dismiss the fact that someone might have just burned a million dollars. Gorgon further speculated that all of this might be a marketing stunt by one US spot Bitcoin ETF issuer.

Jeremy Hogan, a partner at the Hogan & Hogan law firm, had his own theories about the whole situation. He thinks that the transactions might be an attempt to reveal the true identity of Bitcoin’s creator. With this, the crypto network and its creator can leverage the new US tax rules.

In case you didn’t know, the taxpayers in the US must report every crypto transfer over $10,000 to the IRS as of 2024. Hogan posted on the X platform that the only thing that makes sense is that the sender is flushing out Satoshi. He added that the creator now must dox himself or break the law.

Arkham’s data shows that before the transaction to Satoshi’s wallet, the sending address didn’t have any other transfer history. However, later it did interact with a different address labelled as the brokerage platform Robinhood’s hot wallet.

Crypto market experts estimate that Nakamoto’s Bitcoin total holdings feature 1.1 million worth of BTC. This is worth almost $50 billion and it spreads to numerous addresses.