Crypto mystery: Who moved 600 Bitcoins from 2010?

Before Bitcoin was traded on exchanges, before anyone paid 10,000 coins for two pizzas, and before its market value reached trillions of dollars, someone turned on a computer in March 2010 and mined 12 blocks on the young network.

Over the weekend, the Bitcoins received for that work moved for the first time in more than 16 years.

In total, 600 Bitcoins were transferred from 12 addresses, 50 coins from each. According to data from Whale Alert and Arkham, the pattern of mining and transfers reinforces the estimate that all the addresses belong to the same early miner. At a current Bitcoin price of about $79,500 according to CoinMarketCap, the total value stands at about $47.7 million.

A time when Bitcoin didn’t even have a price

What makes the story unusual is not just the amount, but the age of the coins.

The Bitcoins were mined in early March 2010, months before an organized market price for Bitcoin began to form. At that time, it was possible to participate in mining using a standard computer CPU, and the reward for each block was 50 Bitcoins. Today, after four halving events, the reward is just 3.125 Bitcoins.

The fact that the coins come from the "Satoshi era" immediately raised the obvious question: Has the creator of Bitcoin himself started moving coins?