Speculation Swirls Over the 2009 Bitcoin Miner

The bitcoin sphere is abuzz following the movement of coins mined just about a month after the genesis block, sending all into frenzied speculation.

The 50 bitcoins that partially found their way to Coinbase through a new segwit address are not that much, just half a million, but the question is how much more does this person or entity have.

So making all this very relevant, with nonce analysis probably to follow at some point. Until then, one has to wonder is this one of those miners that run it for a bit and then got bored, or is this a long lost treasure chest.

Antoine Le Calvez, of the blockchain data site Coin Metrics, tells Trustnodes 1,087,821.69 bitcoins mined in 2009 have not moved.

It is believed Satoshi Nakamoto, the bitcoin inventor, mined maybe about 750,000 bitcoin from the setup that mined the genesis block and block nine which is known to be Nakamoto’s.

That leaves 300,000 unmoved coins mined by others, worth close to $3 billion, making it about 2% of the current market cap.

It is suggested about 2,000 CPUs mined in that year, with difficulty being about 1.

“I mined about 200btc with a pentium 4  pc in a couple of day,” says one bitcoiner in a now eight year old thread.

“Back then, the mining difficulty was very low, so you could mine with a regular computer all by yourself without being in a mining pool (there were no pools yet).  You would get an entire block by yourself a few times per day.  Each block solved would result in 50 BTC,” says another one.

Meaning you could fairly easily mine 100,000 bitcoin in those early days, with 10,000 bitcoin worth about $20 as late as the 22nd of May 2010 when they were exchanged for two pizzas.

In February 2009, it was more about whether you could bother to run the fairly CPU intensive node software which could crash your windows computer if you didn’t have the latest one and even then it was probably an annoying thing running for what one could have easily perceived as pointless reasons.

That’s because back then one could have easily seen it as some sort of a game. You download the software – windows only initially – then you click generate, and that’s that, you get these numbers on the screen which were worthless and you can’t do anything with them.

That was the state as late as 2010 when Gavin Andresen, one of the first bitcoin protocol developers, gave away for fully free 5 bitcoin in a faucet where all you had to do is just click and get.

So temptation was probably very strong for maybe 80% of those that run the software to mine for a bit and then just get rid of it, thinking it as some maybe interesting thing, but whatever, got work to do and ‘real’ games to play.

Yet some did take bets, and Hal Finney for example publicly speculated in the early days bitcoin could go to a million, which obviously by any ‘sane’ person was dismissed as nonsense.

Hal Finney was a developer for PGP, a tool that can prove your identity without revealing much about yourself, with it involving pretty cutting edge cryptography.

He was also the earliest known bitcoin miner after Nakamoto, with the now departed Finney publicly tweeting he was running bitcoin as of 11th of January 2009.

That’s just days after the genesis block on the third of January of that year, and therefore one should think he mined a lot of coins. Making him one of the primary candidates for these February 2009 coins that have just moved.

Finney suffered from a degenerative illness, so a lot of those coins were sold back when price was far lower, yet just months before he departed in 2014 he said:

“Those discussions about inheriting your bitcoins are of more than academic interest. My bitcoins are stored in our safe deposit box, and my son and daughter are tech savvy.”

We reached out to Fran Finney, his widow, to ask whether she or the Finney estate moved these coins, but we have not received a response in time for publishing.

What is known is that “they traded the majority of his bitcoins for dollars long before the currency’s spike in value late last year [2013],” according to Wired.

The majority, with many years moving since so it’s not clear how much they may have sold after 2014, nor has the estate made public just how much bitcoin they inherited.

One of course can not discount that this was one of those ‘testing’ or bored or annoyed miners, with countless of stories of people clicking ‘generate’ to no heed or people throwing their ‘worthless’ coins down some landfill.

Yet February 2009 is so early, it couldn’t have been more than a dozen miners, with it unclear what their mindset might have been but presumably they thought this could be something, and the fact they held them for more than a decade kind of clearly indicates this wasn’t some passerby.

Instead maybe they were one of those early believers, with May 20 2020 of course having a ring to it.

So could this actually be the man himself? Could it be Satoshi Nakamoto testing waters?

With central banks printing like no tomorrow, in an atmosphere where people are starting to question the debt based system, at a time when the Austrian school of economics could rise, one does wonder whether the genius is at work.

Of course he most probably would be familiar with what others think are his addresses, and so thus perhaps is doing what he does best: being while not being.

The fact he sent some of it to Coinbase maybe speaks against that suggestion, but then the fact it does so is exactly what you would do.

So the man himself making a statement while the Federal Reserve Banks say there are no limits to what they can do, makes for a nice narrative even if a speculative one.

For the first time in history people paid the British government to take their money. In a debt system, that’s effectively a declaration the monetary system has fully failed.

That’s because if you can print money at will, as central and commercial banks do, and you demand less in capital than you lend out, then you’re effectively just giving people money, as in you’re giving to non producers the value created by producers in what amounts to communism, which has failed due to the incentive problem.

Hence the billionaire Ray Dalio stating the dollar has entered its last stage. Meaning the current financial system is basically collapsing, not necessarily next year or decade, but an alternative is no longer a joke.

That’s especially the case as the current financial system works in precisely the very same way in every single country on this earth.

China, America, Russia, or some parts of Arabia, as well as Europe, may well be engaging in all sorts of arguments but fundamentally where the way their monetary system is concerned, there is absolutely zero difference whatever.

Zero. Not one country operates any differently in the most crucial matter of money and its nature. Enemy states still sit on the same table of the Bank for International Settlements where they all are no longer enemies, but friends.

Amid all this, for the genius to basically say there is another way is of course something that can’t be discounted and maybe something we’d like to think has happened here.

Yet who exactly moved these coins and why, or how many coins they may have, is something that we do not know as it stands.

Copyrights Trustnodes.com