A Miner From Bitcoin’s First Weeks Moved 600 Coins

On September 5, twelve wallets that had sat untouched since 2010 came to life. Between blocks 965,639 and 965,646, they swept 600 bitcoin — about $47.84 million — into freshly made addresses. Blockchain trackers Whale Alert and btcparser flagged the movement; Arkham Intelligence tags the original addresses as a miner. These were not merely old coins. They were coinbase rewards, mined on March 2, 3, 4 and 5, 2010, when network difficulty sat near 1 and blocks were still won on ordinary CPUs.

The timeline is the point. The coins were minted before bitcoin had a market price, and before the first commercial transaction — the famous pizza purchase — on May 22, 2010. Whoever earned them was running mining software in bitcoin’s first ten weeks, when almost no one was watching.

Rare even among old coins

Dormant-coin movements have become common as bitcoin’s price climbed, but genuine 2010 spends are not. Of the roughly 6,428 vintage bitcoin that moved in August, only two came from wallets created in 2010. A clean run of a dozen 2010 coinbase rewards in a single afternoon is unusual enough that trackers noticed within minutes. The last comparable 2010 awakening was in January, when a single miner shifted a far larger stack.

Moved, not necessarily sold

A sweep like this is easy to misread as a sell signal. The coins went to new native-SegWit (P2WPKH) addresses, not to an exchange, using a “send everything” consolidation — the pattern of an owner upgrading wallet formats or tightening security, not obviously dumping. Blockchair rated the transfers’ privacy a middling 60 out of 100. Where the coins go next is unknown, and the owner’s identity is unknown too.

Mined before bitcoin had a price — and before anyone had spent one on lunch.

Why it registers at all

Ancient coins are a small, quiet share of supply, and each awakening is a reminder that a slice of bitcoin’s float has been effectively frozen for over a decade. Some of it belongs to people who forgot, died, or lost their keys; some, like this holder, kept access all along and simply chose this week to move. Either way, the ledger recorded the reward in 2010 and honored it in 2026, no permission required — which is the entire proposition.

Why it matters: bitcoin’s oldest coins can move at any time, and every awakening measures how much early supply is still out there, waiting.