Bitcoin Whale Moves $230 Million for 57 Cents Using Bitcoin

A bitcoin whale has moved 40,000 BTC (USD $229,000,000) from one Bitcoin address to another on May 1st for a negligible network fee.

A Bitcoin whale has moved over 40,000 BTC or over ($212m) moved from one address (bc1q9sh6544xls87x7skjzyfhkty4wq7z76vn7qzq9) to another (bc1q5shngj24323nsrmxv99st02na6srekfctt30ch).

There are some theories floating around on Twitter as to who the whale is. Some people have speculated on Twitter that the whale is Bitcointalk user “Loaded” who is a well-known poster on the forum. Loaded is as well-known for his posts on the forum as he is for his stash of 40,000 BTC.

Bitcointalk's famous whale Loaded is moving its 40k BTC stash again.https://t.co/t6y909jN2Ehttps://t.co/TrHwb4s2H6 — Antoine Le Calvez (@khannib) May 1, 2019

Further theories floated around on the forum itself that it was Loaded who made the transaction — although the user has not confirmed or denied that they made the transaction.

It should be noted that the Bitcoin in the address shows a pattern of moving from one address to the next for no apparent reason according to the transaction history on Blockchain.com.

Another thing to note is the first three characters of the address. ‘bc1’ means that the address is using the segregated witness (SegWit) protocol that currently accounts for 40% of all Bitcoin transactions according to transactionfee.info. Segwit is a protocol that was introduced on the 23rd of August to make Bitcoin transactions faster and cheaper.

The amount of money used to move the $292,000 million was only 57 cents according to the data. As Bitcoinist reported earlier, Bitcoin fees are often mismatched with how much the user should actually be paying. This mistake, according to researchers, was due to the fact that consumer wallets appear to incorrectly estimate the required fee.

Although the 40,000 Bitcoin transaction is no small amount, it pales in comparison to the transaction that occurred on the 10th of January this year.

A total of 130,004 BTC ($742,972,860.00) was sent to the following address. (385cR5DM96n1HvBDMzLHPYcw89fZAXULJP). To date, this remains as the second largest bitcoin transaction ever, with the largest being 500,000 BTC which occurred on November 16, 2011.

Bitcoin whales accumulate

As previously reported by Bitcoinist, the whales in the market seem to be going through a period of accumulation. In fact, 100 of the largest bitcoin wallet addresses accumulated 150,000 extra bitcoin.

Bitcoinist did the math on this accumulation and deduced that they came from wallets holding less than 1,000 and 10,000 BTC. So the ‘rich’ are getting richer — many of which belong to exchanges — while the less-informed crypto speculators continue dropping bags.

What do you think of the crypto market? Will it recover? Let us know in the comments!

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Shutterstock