Someone bought 26.9 BTC on Binance and sent it to Satoshi's dead wallet (opens in new tab)

It could also be that the founds are somehow related to illegal activities and this is just a way to get rid of them. Remember how hard it was for the Bitfinex hackers to launder their Bitcoins.

This is pretty much a proof of burn, it proves that X person has no longer access to these coins.

If nobody knows what "Satoshi" is, it could be a person, it could also be an agency, it could also probably be the NSA, or perhaps the FED

https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency...

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/884

https://www.tsa.gov/digital-id

If that's a governmental agency, it's perhaps to

- crowdfund the development of multiple technologies

- harden the security by allowing people to make money (to attract evil entities)

- mainstream the idea of a digital wallet/identity

The "bottom up" psyop

> "Has Satoshi come back from the dead?"

I think Satoshi coming back from the dead would totally tank the price, as he owns something like 5% of all BTC ever mined (~$43b).

re: who profits from this, got me thinking - even though $1m is a drop in the bucket of the market cap, could burning that amount of funds have any meaningful effect on the price? since the time of this transaction, prices have gone up 1.5% which is not huuuugely significant and causation != correlation

I think the hacked whale account makes most sense to me tho

Yeah, living in reality is just too boring atm better dream up some shitty conspiracy to manipulate the crypto market. Hilarious.

If the hacker could send to that address they could send to one they controlled. I rate your theory as doubtful.

I like this theory, but I think it could also be some investment bank in order to draw attention to bitcoin and pump it up before the ETFs.

Wouldn't that hacker include some text in the transaction to prove who did it or send it to an address they control? How they can prove they are the ones that can brag?

Shouldn't he or she then be somewhere around bragging?

Also if you can send BTC to some wallet, why couldn't you send it to another wallet where you indeed have access?

If a hacker could withdraw to this wallet, it stands to reason he could withdraw to his own.

I like it. Someone please make this into a Netflix series.

So the ex wastes 1.2 million dollars of BTC to hurt them… rough…

I don’t think Binance allows you to do much with just a password. Not that the "theory" really needed more debunking.

And thus the Bobbit coin was minted

With all other dollar holders, proportional to their holdings, in any case. Not exactly effective charity.

I read the whole article, thought it was great, then went to follow the author, only to realize it was Aaron Schwartz :(

This only helps people holding BTC though.

That was a great read, thanks for sharing.

Aaron Swartz, RIP <3

I'm pretty certain Satoshi's identity is known, although not publicly stated and/or confirmed by anyone. I believe a handful of the early developers had very strong suspicion as to who was behind the name, but never pursued a confirmation of it.

My money is on Len [1]. The sheer number of coincidences, crossing of rare skill sets and interests, time, place, penchant of pseudo anonymously publishing things and happened to take his own life <2 months after Satoshi's final gloom-filled message, "I’ve moved on to other things and probably won’t be around in the future".

[1] https://evanhatch.medium.com/len-sassaman-and-satoshi-e483c8...

Plot twist, that guy is actually Satoshi, and pretending to look for himself is to deflect suspicion.

Average mid level programmer in our country will have to work 190+ years for this amount of money.

[edit] Now, I think I should focus on other things. Average politicians can earn (/s) 50x more money in 5 years than what average programer earns in 190+ years.

Time is a concept of human design to demarcate wealth into units to be sold to the poor through the value exchange of labor.

You’re welcome, I’m not saying you don’t need money to participate in the experience of being a human. But there is more power in our belief in their unit (as this particular experience exposes about one store of value…. It certainly says about another.

The joker is real. ;)

If things keep going as well as they have been for me, I will never have earned this amount in my entire life cumulative.

That's my theory too.

A very similar thing used to happen with people accidentally using a QR code linking to a popular blog post or something explaining QR codes ("PLEASE INSERT QR CODE HERE --ed.").

Somewhat hilariously, even Google's (discontinued) Titan security key had this type of blunder in its Bluetooth software: It was using the example key from the Bluetooth specifications for all keys, making them vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks [1].

[1] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-2102

Exactly what I was thinking. Someone somewhere along the line someone accidentally just used Satoshi's address copied from some docs.

May even just be a low-information buyer.

Worth sticking these here, for ease of reading on mobile if nothing else

> This could possibly have some connection to my involuntary hobby-horse.

> Recent leaked emails[1] show that Calvin Ayre-- the billionaire rube that has been funding Craig Wright's litigation-- believes that Wright actually controls early addresses in the blockchain, consistent with Wright's initial claims but contradicting Wright's more recent claims in court (that he "stomped the hard drives"). Calvin believes Wright can only win the lawsuit against Bitcoin devs by using these early keys and has been pressuring Wright to do so. I'd agree that at this point it would be his only path to even have a chance of winning, and even that would be far from certian given the extraordinary level of obvious forgeries.

> On December 20th the UK courts increased the security Wright owes the Bitcoin devs for trial from £100k to £900k. The remaining amount not already paid was due today. (We won't know for a few days if the payment to the court cleared). At the time of the transfer 26.91679286 was worth about £920k.

> Up thread it's noted that the source of the funds has heavy BRC-20 activity and I've been told that Ayre has been significantly funding BRC-20 activity.

> I wouldn't expect Wright to make the payment out of funds newly received from Ayre, but rather to make them out of float used to pay his legal representation going forward, and then get a top-up payment from Ayre. Wouldn't it be funny if Ayre paid Satoshi's address as part of an effort to force Wright to use it? It would be clever on his part: If he believes Wright will lose unless he uses the address then funding him via an address he can't use won't make things worse and it might save Ayre money if Wright's inability to pay terminates the case early. It would be a genuinely good idea, given Ayre's beliefs. (a better idea would be to wake up and stop being ripped off, but that would have happened long ago if it were going to happen)

> Another related explanation is that someone may have set this address as their primary address on a service, either as a joke or because they were LARPing as Satoshi-- and then they either accidentally withdrew to it or got kicked off the platform and automatically had their funds sent there. Who do we know LARPs as Satoshi and may have needed to access another 26.9-ish Bitcoin today?? Tongue

> History may not repeat but it does rhyme. During the large ATO investigation into Wright, Wright sent some amount of bitcoin equal to his tax-ID to some high value address he was (falsely) claiming to own-- so he could then point to his tax ID on the blockexplorer page as evidence that he owned the address. The tax office didn't fall for it, but I could easily see some people falling for it. 26.9 BTC is a lot of money but relative to the amount Wright is spending on litigation it's not that substantial, it wouldn't be impossible for that manic to think he could get some benefit in court by throwing coins away at Satoshi's address.

> All in all it's probably more likely that someone had the genesis address in their clipboard for some reason, but I wouldn't find any of the above too shocking and they are fun to consider.

40,000 $ * 26.9 = 1,076,000 $

Bitcoin ETF is supposed to launch next week.

edit: reason for the downvotes? What am i missing here? What else could it be marketing for?

It's more than that - this particular address is the coinbase output of the genesis block (block 0) and it's literally unspendable.

edit: I'm wrong, see https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block

I'm betting there's a 100% chance that nobody has the key to Satoshi's wallet.

And if he does all bitcoins will be pretty burnt.

Quite an expensive point to make. I would think that more than a million USD is overkill.

Proves nothing, anyone can send to any one address.

How easy is it to fat finger a million dollar transaction like this?

Let’s say somebody had Satoshi’s wallet address on their clipboard, tried to copy their own, failed, Satoshi’s was still on the clipboard, then they proceeded with the transaction.

Wouldn’t they at least look at the first few and last few chars of the address before hitting submit?

Also this transaction seems to have been sent out at 9am GMT.

Institutional sender during business hours?

Nothing was wasted. Currency is not a resource, it's a kind of debt arrangement.

Or as more commonly put: you can't eat money.

It's not actually wasted, the money went to people who held the 26.9 BTC before this transaction.

If you burn currency it's not wasted, it deflates the remaining currency in proportion, so in effect it's gifting to other holders. Assuming it's never used after this.

Just wait until you learn about the time The K Foundation burnt £1 mil in cash.

Maybe someone was trying to make a philosophical point about the existence of a truly selfless act.

My theory its a big "thank you" - Its actually not that stupid or weird if the sender does not care about the money. Maybe an early bitcoin adopter that hodled, and is now a multi-millionaire. If I was that person, I would feel a need to say "thank you" to the person that made this possible. If Satoshi is alive - no matter if he can access the wallet or not, he definitely would see this a thank you and a way of appreciation. If he is dead, well, at last the public can see that there are people that cleary valued his work - something like a monument. Plus, by burning the bitcoin, value should increase for everyone hodling, so a shout-out to the peers.

And yes, one could argue why not give away this incredible amount of money to charity. But then I ask myself why do I go out to a restaurant and order ribeye steak and an IPA on Saturday, instead of having spaghetti at home and give the 50$ to the next homeless person.

> Any theories or context known?

My money is on a "thank you Satoshi for Bitcoin's 15th".

See my post elsewhere in the thread.

Lost a bet? Fat fingered an address? Glad it wasn’t my million.

A stunt to cheaply move the price.

You have to be a special kind of nihilistic idealist to do this. Instead of actually making a similar “sacrifice” to accomplish something at least marginally useful..

"Wallet" is kind of the wrong term to use. The address is associated with the genesis block (block 0) and is unspendable per the consensus rules. (edit: I'm wrong on that last point, see https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block)

Dead wallet means the private key to it is likely lost so nobody has access to it. Though there's always a chance someone actually still has it, so you can never say with certainty that a wallet is dead.

As for supply limitation, the current market cap of BTC is USD 860B, so this is 0.0001%.

> What means dead wallet? Might it be artificial supply limitation?

There are a number of addies with Bitcoins stored on them that are extremely unlikely (probability so tiny it's just zero for all intents and purposes) to be accessible:

This one for example (with a current balance of around $1.2k):

https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/1BitcoinEaterAddressD...

Here's a list from our friends at r/Buttcoin:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/3kqdjv/a_list_of_...

I don't think your second question makes sense. (Overall BTC supply? 1 million is a microscopic fraction of what's in circulation. 1 billion would be a little bit more interesting)

Just burning a mill, nothing to see here!

Probably edge cases like illegal stuff and privacy stuff (VPN subscription, for example). Other than that regular money works better for buying stuff!

Yes, anyone who is rich and want an asset that can't be taken from them by goverment. Apparently also people in countries without easy access to bank accounts.

Still a thing. Making money exploiting people's greed also still a thing.

No doubt Satoshi will send it back.

If anything, without the story, this just makes Binance more sketchy.

This would only work assuming the IRS knows who Satoshi is, if they live in the States at all. One would also have to proof to the IRS that you own the addresses, do they understand public key cryptography?