A Bitcoin miner from the cryptocurrency's early days has suddenly sprung to life. They moved 250 Bitcoin worth nearly $14 million on Wednesday. This whale had been quiet for over a decade.
The wallet started stacking sats back in 2010. That's when mining was way easier than now. On-chain data shows this.
Bitcoin mining was different back then. A few geeks could earn coins with basic computers. It was a piece of cake compared to today's setup.
The scene changed big time between 2010 and 2015. At first, you could mine with just a regular PC. The network wasn't that tough to crack. Early birds dominated the game when Bitcoin was still under the radar.
As Bitcoin blew up, mining got harder. Fancy hardware called ASICs came into play. Big mining pools formed too. These pools let miners team up to boost their chances of validating blocks.
The whale's long nap is pretty intriguing. Why sit on those coins for so long? Maybe they really believed in Bitcoin's future. Or perhaps it was just too tricky to move the coins safely back then.
Looking at the blockchain, we can see the miner's initial 250 BTC was worth $28,080 in May 2013. Now it's ballooned to a whopping $14,022,065. That's a profit of over $13.9 million, which is nothing to sneeze at. This transfer lines up with what CryptoQuant's boss Ki Young Ju says is a buying spree for Bitcoin after Monday's price dip.
Young Ju dropped some stats on Twitter. He said 404,448 BTC have moved to long-term hodler addresses in the past month. That's a boatload of coins going into cold storage, hinting that big players are betting on Bitcoin as a store of value.
"It's clearly accumulation," Young Ju wrote. He reckons we'll know if this bet pays off within a year.
This early miner's move might be part of a bigger trend. With over 400,000 BTC moving to long-term addresses, it looks like some heavy hitters are feeling bullish about Bitcoin's future. Time will tell if these whales are onto something or if they're just making waves in the crypto ocean.