A total of 50 bitcoins were stored in the wallet, and they were worth less than $4 when the wallet was last accessed more than 11 years ago. With Bitcoin’s incredible price rise since then, the funds are now worth more than $3 million at today’s exchange rates, according to the report.
Because of bitcoin’s semi-anonymous character, it is feasible to follow transactions on the public blockchain, but it is not possible to associate them with a specific person or organization. It is not the first time this year that a so-called “sleeping whale” has awakened, with a comparable amount from the same time period being shifted back to the beginning of the year.
The 50 bitcoins that were gained at the time were derived from the mining reward size, which was 50 bitcoins per block at the time of acquisition. Last month, a bitcoin wallet holding 616 BTC was also activated after being inactive for over nine years, according to the blockchain.
Because of the fundamental technology of bitcoin, only 21 million bitcoins will ever be created. However, many million bitcoins have been trapped in decades-old wallets, where their access keys may have been lost or forgotten for all time. At the moment, the most valued inactive wallet has about 80,000 bitcoins, which is equivalent to approximately $5 billion at current exchange rates.
According to statistics from BitInfoCharts, the total amount of money stored in bitcoin addresses that have been inactive for more than nine years is considerably in excess of $20 billion.