A recent $1.2 million deposit to the wallet of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s elusive creator, comes after the user’s decade-long dormancy and the platform’s 15th anniversary.
The cryptocurrency community is currently abuzz in light of new developments concerning Bitcoin’s mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. As per Krisztian Sandor of CoinDesk, an unidentified crypto wallet deposited around 27 bitcoins—the equivalent of $1.2 million—to Nakamoto’s “Genesis” wallet on January 5. The wallet is particularly significant, as it’s the platform’s inaugural one, which Nakamoto created on January 3, 2009. Sandor adds that the transaction comes just two days after Bitcoin’s 15th anniversary.
Nakamoto disappeared from Bitcoin for over a decade, reports Billy Bambrough of Forbes. As such, the hefty deposit has sparked numerous conversations about the intention behind it.
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Marketing Move Or Lure?
According to Sandor’s CoinDesk feature, people suspect the transaction was either a marketing stunt or an attempt to reveal Nakamoto’s true identity. Starting this 2024, taxpayers in the U.S. must report crypto transactions over $10,000 to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). This is why Attorney Jeremy Hogan, a partner at law firm Hogan & Hogan, suspects that the deposit was meant to lure Nakamoto into breaking the law and revealing personal information.
Alternatively, Coinbase director Conor Grogan posited that the deposit could be a strategic move to “bring a long-awaited spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) to market,” as per Bambrough’s Forbes feature.
In an X post, Coinbase’s Grogan posted a screenshot of the transaction and wrote: “Either Satoshi woke up, bought 27 bitcoin from Binance, and deposited into their wallet, or someone just burned a million dollars.”
The Mystery Of Satoshi Nakamoto
Many have tried to unmask the elusive creator of Bitcoin—a platform that kickstarted the cryptocurrency world that many know today. Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared from Bitcoin in 2010, just a few years after publishing its white paper in 2008, as per Forbes.
In 2014, Newsweek released an article that claimed to have uncovered the identity of the pseudonymous user, stating that it was Japanese-American immigrant Satoshi Nakamoto. However, the man had changed his name to Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto in 1973, according to records from U.S. District Court of Los Angeles.
Nakamoto graduated from California State Polytechnic University, before working in the defense and electronics communications division of Hughes Aircraft in southern California. At the time of reporting, Nakamoto was 64 years old, placing him at around 73 years of age this year. That said, Nakamoto has continuously contested claims linking him to Bitcoin.
According to a 2014 CNBC article by Matt Clinch, though Nakamoto states that much of the information within the Newsweek article was correct, he does not affiliate himself with the cryptocurrency platform.
More Coins
This brings the public no closer to solving the mystery of Bitcoin’s creator. To this day, users are unsure of whether “Satoshi Nakamoto” is really a single individual or a group of people. Regardless of who’s behind the mask, the amount within Nakamoto’s Genesis wallet has greatly increased since the transaction.
During its dormancy, the wallet contained 50 bitcoins—the same amount it had since its first bitcoin block, as per Forbes. From the time Nakamoto disappeared, the wallet hasn’t sent any bitcoins. With the additional 27 coins, the value of the wallet has increased to around $4 million.
Bambrough of Forbes adds that at present, Satoshi Nakamoto controls roughly over 1 million bitcoin, which is currently worth almost $50 billion. Whoever they may be, they’re now among the 25 richest people in the world.
Banner photo by Fekist via Wikimedia Commons.
