Yesterday something peculiar happened: the news came out that a whale had moved a large amount of Bitcoins that had not moved since 2010, but when this news spread, the price of BTC did not react at all.
Usually, news like this spreads some concern in the market, but this time it was completely ignored. It seems to show that the price of Bitcoin is currently going its own way again, until the halving on April 20th.
Bitcoin moves through the whale and the price reaction
The BTC were moved by the whale on Tuesday, and in total they were about 2,000. Nowadays, they have a market value of about 140 million dollars, and is comparable to the amount of BTC liquidated daily by the Grayscale ETF in this period.
The fact is that those BTC have not moved since 2010, when they were mined between August and November of the same year.
So someone who mined Bitcoin at the time collected them and kept them for 14 years, only to move them all at once yesterday.
It should be remembered that at the time Bitcoin had existed for just over a year and a half, and its market value was on average less than $0.1. Overall, the 2,000 BTC moved yesterday was worth less than $200 at the time.
Until November 2012, anyone who managed to mine a block was awarded 50 BTC, and in fact anyone could do it with even a simple computer. To earn 2,000 BTC by mining, you only needed to mine 40 blocks, and from August to November 2010, around 25,000 blocks were mined in total.
So what is surprising is not that the whale was able to accumulate 2,000 BTC in 2010, but that it lasted them for 14 years.
The movements of the whale
It is not known who owns the BTC, but it is unlikely to be an exchange, as at the time there were very few exchanges with insignificant trading volumes.
For example, it is enough to remember that it often happened that there were whole days without a single exchange.
Instead, it is much more likely that he was a member of the cypherpunk community in which Bitcoin was already relatively widespread, and that he was simply accumulating BTC through mining, since anyone could do that even with low-powered machines at the time.
Moreover, it is since 2020 that those whale movements Bitcoin collected in the early years are probably always thanks to mining.
Actually, in this March 2024, he already made three big moves, one on March 1, always of 2,000 BTC, and another on March 5 of 1,000 BTC. In total, he moved 5,000 BTC in March alone for a value in dollars of around 350 million.
This is probably also why the news did not trigger a sell-off in the current market, as these moves have been going on for some time now.
Furthermore, it is not even known exactly what happens to those BTC once moved, because if they are sold on exchanges, they can actually lower the price.
Since this does not happen, it is assumed that they have not been moved to be sold, also because the number of Bitcoins present on the known wallets of exchanges has decreased in the last 30 days.
The price of Bitcoin
However, yesterday the price of Bitcoin recorded some movement, although not because of this news, and with a practically zero final balance.
Before the opening of the US stock exchanges, it was about $70,000.
Just before their opening, it quickly rose to more than $71,500, anticipating the clearly positive opening of the US stock exchanges.
However, once news spread that a US judge had dismissed Coinbase’s request to dismiss the SEC’s charges against the exchange, the price began to fall, reaching $68,300 a few hours later.
Once the trading session on the US stock exchanges closed, the price of Bitcoin slowly returned to where it started, namely $70,000, thus canceling out all the day’s losses.
It has lateralized around $70,000 since Monday, without the strength to rise above $72,000, nor the weakness to fall below $68,000.
The rally that started in early February ended on March 14th with a new high of $73,800, while the correction that started the same day ended on Wednesday, March 20th. From the same Wednesday to Sunday, it then rose again to $70,000, and since then it has been trading sideways around this figure.
The hypothesis circulating is that the current sideways movement may continue at least until the end of the month, while it may return to move significantly from next week.
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