Twelve long-dormant Bitcoin addresses containing 600 BTC, worth approximately $48 million, moved their funds on September 5, 2026, according to onchain data tracked by Cointelegraph and Bitcoin.com News. The coins originated from block rewards mined in early March 2010 during Bitcoin’s early CPU-mining era, sparking onchain attention and speculation over whether the vintage stash could connect to pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
Onchain Analysis Rules Out Satoshi Nakamoto Connection
Despite the vintage timeline, blockchain analytics platform Whale Alert confirmed through its research that none of the 12 blocks tied to the transfer connect to Nakamoto. According to a Whale Alert spokesperson interviewed by Cointelegraph, researchers examined the underlying block data and found no link to the project’s creator, who remained active in Bitcoin development and communications through 2010 before gradually withdrawing from the project, with their last known communication dating to April 2011.
The movement involved 12 legacy Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK) addresses, a primitive transaction format used during Bitcoin’s infancy. Arkham Intelligence tagged the original wallets as a miner, reflecting an era when blocks paid a 50 BTC subsidy and network difficulty was near one. According to Btcparser.com tracking cited by Bitcoin.com News, the funds were swept into newer Pay-to-Witness-Public-Key-Hash (P2WPKH) wallets at block height 965639, achieving a moderate privacy score of 60 out of 100 on Blockchair.
Contrasting Vintage Miner Activity and Market Context
The sudden awakening of 600 vintage coins stands out due to the volume of 2010-era Bitcoin shifting in a single sweep. Data from Bitcoin.com News shows that out of 6,427.59 vintage BTC shifted during the preceding month, only two coins originated from wallets created in 2010. By contrast, this September 5 event swept 12 coinbase rewards mined across March 2, 3, 4, and 5, 2010.
Lookonchain initially flagged a subset of these wallets, noting that seven miner wallets moved 350 BTC after 16.5 years of inactivity. Whale Alert noted that one of the rewards moved across several blocks prior to the rest, a pattern consistent with a test transaction executed before completing the remaining bulk transfers. When these coins were originally generated, Bitcoin lacked a market price, trading between $0.0008 and $0.08 later that summer before the first BTC transaction that occurred on May 22, 2010.
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