On May 1, 2019, a mysterious Bitcoin whale moved 40,000 BTC ($212 million at the time) from one Bitcoin address to another for a miniscule fee of just 57 cents, according to the transactional data on Blockchain.com.
While it’s unknown who this Bitcoin whale is, people are speculating as to the identity of the whale and sharing their ideas via Twitter. One such theory is that the whale is the well-known Bitcointalk user, “Loaded,” who purportedly has a Bitcoin stash totaling 40,000 BTC.
In addition to the Twitter post above, theories have been circulating on Bitcointalk.org that “Loaded,” a well-known poster on the forum made the transaction. However, despite these claims, the aforementioned Bitcoin whale has not confirmed or denied that he made the transaction.
The amount of money used to move the 40,000 BTC which, at the time of writing is worth $238 million, was just 57 cents. This is very impressive as moving this amount of money just isn’t possible with traditional financial methods.
It should also be noted that the Bitcoin in the address has been transferred from one address to another for no apparent reason multiple times, according to the publicly available transactional history from blockchain.com.
Therefore, not only does it cost just cents to move millions of dollars with Bitcoin, but it can be done at any time for no apparent reason because the Bitcoin user is in control, not a third party financial institution or bank.
Another thing that should be noted is the first three characters of the address, ‘bc1’, which indicates that the Bitcoin address is using the segregated witness (SegWit) protocol, which makes Bitcoin transactions faster and cheaper.
Currently, SegWit only accounts for about 40% of all Bitcoin transactions according to transactionfee.info and it was introduced back in August 2017.
Therefore, the Bitcoin whale who made this 40,000 BTC transaction for 57 cents may have done so just to prove a point that people should be using SegWit addresses rather than Legacy addresses to send and receive Bitcoin.
While it remains unclear who the aforementioned Bitcoin whale is and why they transferred 40,000 BTC to another wallet, it is clear that Bitcoin whales have already accumulated significant amounts of Bitcoin since it bottomed in December of last year.
As previously reported by IIB and according to Weiss, 100 of the largest Bitcoin wallets (excluding exchanges) have accumulated substantial amounts of Bitcoin during the beginning of 2019 at low prices. In fact, it’s reported that the whales accumulated 150,000 BTC during Bitcoin’s lows which are now valued over $1.5 billion.
Therefore, this begs the question, when will these Bitcoin whales dump on the market and take some profits? After all, Bitcoin’s price has steadily risen from this year’s low of $3,400 in February and is now pushing to break $6,000.
Do you think everyone should use SegWit addresses to reduce Bitcoin fees and improve transaction speeds? Will Bitcoin whales take profits soon or are they just getting started with accumulation? Let us know what you think in the comment section below.
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