The Mystery of the Dormant Bitcoin Wallets: A 12-Year-Old Transaction

A group of old wallets that were created in 2010 and had not been used for more than 12 years moved 100 bitcoins worth over $3 million for the first time on June 26. This came after another batch of 50 bitcoins from 2010 was spent on June 15, breaking a long period of inactivity.

Multiple Dormant BTC Wallets Have Come Back To Life This Year

This year, eight old block rewards from 2010 have been moved for the first time in over 12 years. Btcparser.com, a blockchain parser, detected the movements on Monday, June 26, 2023. The two-block rewards were mined on July 12, 2010, indicating that they belonged to the same person.

The owner of the first block reward confirmed it at block 795,936 and sent 49 BTC to one address and 0.99 BTC to another. Both addresses are still inactive and have not spent the bitcoin. The second block reward was confirmed at block 795,940 hours later and all the funds went to one address with 49.99 BTC.

Also, the Bitcoin cash (BCH) corresponding to the old coins has not been transferred and the BCH remains dormant. Interestingly, the first transfer of 50 BTC had very little privacy and scored 10 out of 100 due to three identifiable issues. With a low privacy score, Blockchair.com details that “the issues identified seriously jeopardize the privacy of the parties involved.”

The second transaction from 2010 was much more private than the first one from 2009, as it got a score of 55 out of 100 by Blockchair’s privacy tool. This score means that the transaction had a “moderate” level of privacy and only one issue was detected. The issue was that the funds were moved from a legacy address to a Segregated Witness (Segwit) address. 

Segwit is a change in the transaction format of Bitcoin that aims to prevent transaction malleability and increase block capacity by separating the witness data from the input field of the block. Blockchair states that “the issues found are not very serious but they can still be exploited by tracking tools to link transactions.”