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The narrative is also complicated by the fact that while the 50,500 Bitcoins originated from the whale (address: 1933phfhK3ZgFQNLGSDXvqCn32k2buXY8a), most were scattered in 2014 to various wallets that might all be controlled by the same person — or not — and later moved to one wallet again. According to Chainalysis, there were only small transactions associated with this stash until last year, when a thousand Bitcoins were cashed out from the original address. Then there was again a period of little movement — until August.

The Bitcoin community has a tradition of watching the wallets of these early hoarders, such as that of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of the cryptocurrency.

Dread Pirate Roberts

On crypto news sites, Reddit and Twitter, some onlookers speculated that the wallet is linked to Ross Ulbricht, who went by the alias “Dread Pirate Roberts,” the convicted operator for Silk Road, an online marketplace for illicit goods that was one of the early adopters of Bitcoin. Another theory is that it is associated with Mt. Gox, a collapsed Tokyo-based exchange that has to pay back its creditors by liquidating some of its leftover Bitcoin holdings.

As Bitcoin tumbled last week, the community was also afire with a longstanding exchange ShapeShift’s decision to start collecting users’ personal information and reports that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. was retreating on near-term plans to set up a crypto trading desk.

The timing of the whale’s moves — in Chainalysis’s telling — doesn’t exactly coincide with the price declines, but the speculation alone may have contributed to the selloff.

“There will always be these historical addresses that become a little bit of a treasure hunt almost — who they are and when people move them really does spark interest,” said Danny Scott, co-founder at CoinCorner, a crypto exchange and wallet provider based in Isle of Man. “There’s so much noise around the industry and it’s hard to weed out what’s actually happening behind the scenes.”

Bloomberg.com