The topic of this thread is very old wallets suddenly moving crypto... Patience and balls? Or luck and stupidity? Or hack and sudden wealth? Best comment: "99,9% of early BTC investors sold at 2x, 5x or perhaps even 100x, because you would be stupid not to. How often do you get a 100x return from something in tradfi? My hypothesis is that most of the people that held to 100,000x most likely managed to recover an old wallet or have somewhat been locked out of it. Either that or that they simply didn’t need the money." I have to agree. There is no way this guy was just sitting on this for 14 years, waiting for the 4th of July. Another possibility: "I’m not convinced this was diamond hands or prison, but a hack. There have been very old BTC addresses which woke up within the last year. I suspect someone has figured out how to crack the earliest key generation methods, finding some flaw, reducing the compute time to something feasible and so every once in a while an address whose original owners lost track of it ages ago is exploited." "He actually moved 20,000 BTC in two transfers of 10,000 to 2 new wallets"
Some other possibilities: "In 2011, Bitcoin’s circulating supply was around 6–8 million BTC, and 10,000 BTC would’ve represented roughly 0.13–0.17% of it. At that time, such a stack could be acquired through mining, buying on Mt. Gox for ~$7,800, or participating in early dev or darknet activities. It was challenging, but not impossible for early adopters, libertarian techies, or Silk Road players. Bunch of red flags here - the wallet held exactly 10,000 BTC untouched for 14 years; no test transactions, no movement until now. That kind of cold storage discipline is rare, especially for early adopters who often lost keys, panicked, or partially sold. If NSA created Btc then only they can be so nonchalant. Satoshi or Early Dev Wallet. The exact 10,000 BTC and no movement for 14 years resemble early Satoshi-era behavior. It could belong to Hal Finney, Martti Malmi, or someone directly tied to Bitcoin’s origin. Government Seizure Wallet. The wallet might be linked to a silent government seizure - possibly from Silk Road or BTC-e now being moved quietly to liquidate or fund operations. Nation-State Sleeper Whale. A foreign government or intelligence-linked group may have acquired and held the stash as a strategic reserve, now activated to fund war efforts or financial disruption. Dead Man’s Switch or Timed Unlock. The coins could have been programmed to move automatically after a set time, triggered by inactivity, BTC price targets, or the original owner's death. Ross Ulbriht, doing some housekeeping chores. Silk Road launched in February 2011, but went viral in June after a Gawker article exposed it as a darknet marketplace for drugs. That exposure triggered a surge in users and helped drive BTC’s price from ~$2 to ~$30 over the summer. Said BTC were acquired in April 2011. Could Ross receive first payments in just first 4 months after the launch and total more then $7.8k? Shouldn't be that hard. But hold it through all these years even during imprisonment?"
"1 btc transfer could take several hours," So how long a 10K coins transfer would take? Weeks? My personal guess is, this was a Winklewoss transfer. They have money so they didn't need it. They could have bought an old wallet through the years outside of trading circles directly so not affecting the price. The seller didn't have to pay taxes. And they are knowledgeable, so no test transfer was needed. Now they are selling it thus they moved thye coins to prove they had control of the wallet. Mistery solved!
The owner has 2 wallets, 10,000 btc each? You really want a tl;dr from me? Yes ,it would take a couple of weeks or maybe shorter, but the bulk of the time is preparation and testing of the plan, rather than execution of the plan I wrote a whole guide here on ET on how to create a secure computer, but here goes Buy 5 Lenovo laptops, some do not have to be brand new buy used laptops from ebay, actually older ones pre-TPM are preferred Replace the hd/ssd with 2TB ssd, install at least 2 different Linux distros, install bitcoin core v25.2 and electrum on each of the laptops, generate 101 addresses, encrypt every single one of them with a strong password, buy $50 worth of bitcoin from anywhere, send $5 worth of btc to core and electrum on each laptop, send out $1 worth from each wallet, core and electrum, if successful, make an encrypted backups of all the wallets, make sure the backups cover location contingencies, fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, military invasion delete all the wallets, restore all wallets from the encrypted backups, if you failed, you lost $50 worth if successful, as I said on my previous post, I'd import the private key or send to a newer version of bitcoin core, one that supports legacy and newer versions, i.e. segwit and Taproot which are the ultimate destinations of the bitcoin utxos execution of the plan to distribute the 10,000 bitcoin below: 10,000 bitcoin, to 5 different laptops, core and electrum each laptop, 500 btc each address, ultimately 2,000 btc per laptop, 1500 btc on core, 500 btc on electrum minus all the tx fees, of course 500 btc I'll sell otc and regular exchange for fiat, and spend, buy stocks, have savings, I have no need for lambo or yacht or private jet, sorry pretty boring, the 9500 btc will not be touched for a while, maybe plan to give out some to family and friends, , and the other 10,000 btc wallet, probably won't do this process until 6 months or a year from now so the short answer is the whole process will take 1-2 weeks,
Well this guy transferred $2 Billion worth of bitcoin within hours complete final transaction settelement, but I'm not this dude, so I'd be more careful Incidentally, how would you do this if using TradFi, Pek? Would you deposit $1 Billion straight to your BofA checking account and then the other $1 Billion to your Wells Fargo savings account? Curious because FDIC coverage, plus this occurred July 3 close to midnight, I would think you have to go to the bank to talk to the teller or they might freeze your account, no? and shucks, July 4th is a holiday and a Friday, so you'd have to wait until Monday, bummer There is no such thing as buying a bitcoin wallet, Pek I'll give you an example of why it doesn't work, let's say it was Tyler Winklevoss, offered me $100M for this bitcoin wallet in 2020 when 1 btc was $10,000 each, ok, sure here's the wallet on a USB but what he didn't know was that I made 100 backups, scheduled an email to 100 friends and family members with the wallet attached unencrypted that will be sent within a week I take a flight out, spend the $100M as fast as I can and maybe die somewhere out there in the world
How easy is it to actually cash this position into real USD Cash? no stable coin etc.. real 1 billion + deposit into a brokerage account ie Fidelity etc?