A cryptocurrency wallet that has allegedly ‘woken up’ is in the latest Bitcoin news – mostly because of its mysterious movement and the recent deposit of $100 million in Bitcoin to Bitfinex and Binance over the course of ten days during the end of August.
The wallet, which has around $720 million – or 111,114 BTC – makes up the 0.52% of the total supply of the largest cryptocurrency. From its sudden movement, many believe that this wallet has a disruptive potential in the market price action, especially if the funds belong to one or the two likely candidates that some Reddit users are pointing out to.
A Reddit user named sleuth u/sick_silk first noticed the movement of the funds, reporting a series of posts tracking each transaction in detail, paired with graphs to show the activity. The first post was made on 31 August in which the user suggested that the funds may be connected to the now-defunct dark web market Silk Road which traded billions of dollars worth of recreational/prescription drugs, weapons, illegal pornography, malware, hacking services etc.
As the Reddit user wrote:
“It seems that the owner of a huge SilkRoad related wallet is moving funds actively since 3 days, dividing it in chunks of 100 coins by subwallets.
The original wallet owned 111,114.62 BTC / BCH , which is currently valuated ~ $844M (without taking in account other #Bitcoin forks).
Last movements on these subwallets are 4 years and 5 months old (March 9th, 2014).
The chunks have been divided over time to 60,000 coins then to 30,000 / 20,000 / 10,000 / 5,000 / 500 and now 100 coins.”
Sick_silk also connected the original address to the Silk Road via the Bitcointalk thread in which users try to connect the dots to from an address operated by the DPR (Dread Pirate Roberts AKA Ross Ulbricht, creator of the Silk Road) and the one in the Reddit post over the course of six transactions.
They guessed right later in the post; it's an old MtGox whale, unrelated to Silk Road.
— WizSec Bitcoin Research (@wizsecurity) September 4, 2018
Other theories also say that these funds may belong to an old Mt. Gox wallet – which is a statement that the Bitcoin security specialists at WizSec are fully backing. What’s certain is that the movement of the funds may be at least partially responsible for the recent price decline seen in August – and potentially many others in the future.
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