TL;DR
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From the roughly 4.25 million Only BTC that are considered ‘old stock’ (meaning they were mined more than 7 years ago). ~356k of them have ever changed hands!
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On Thursday 139 BTC, which had not been touched since June 2011, moved in a newly created separated witness (SegWhite) address.
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The owner of the BTC has lost his conviction about the cryptocurrency and is getting ready to sell (with a huge profit).
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The owner may have simply moved the BTC for their own safety.
Full story
Fun fact of the day: of the rough 4.25 million Only BTC that are considered ‘old stock’ (meaning they were mined more than 7 years ago). ~356k of them have ever changed hands!
(believed by many to be lost forever).
Of course, more BTC has been mined since then, and many of those coins have changed hands very often – but still.
That brings us to this story.
On Thursday 139 BTC, which had not been touched since June 2011, moved in a newly created separated witness (SegWhite) address.
A SegWit address is a type of Bitcoin address that makes BTC transactions faster and cheaper by reducing the size needed to store transactions in a block.
(Sort of like throwing all your clothes in your suitcase instead of folding them and stuffing them neatly).
So why did this mysterious person move them?
The two main theories go something like this:
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The owner of the BTC has lost his conviction about the cryptocurrency and is getting ready to sell (with a huge profit).
This is possible, although with the next BTC halving cycle coming in less than a year and going through all the highs and lows of the past 12 years, it seems like an odd time to sell.
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It may be for their own safety.
The owner may feel that their original address has been compromised and has moved it to a new address with additional security measures.
Anyway, when coins move from an old supply, people get talking.
Maybe not so many of those 4.25 million BTC were lost after all!