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Yesterday something curious happened: the news came out that a whale 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 apprehension in the market, but this time it has been completely ignored. This seems to show that the price of Bitcoin is once again going its own way at the moment, until the halving on April 20th.
Summary
Bitcoin moved by 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 are 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 was mining Bitcoin at the time collected them and held them for 14 years, only to move them all at once yesterday.
It should be remembered that at the time Bitcoin had only been in existence 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 were worth less than $200 at the time.
Until November 2012, 50 BTC were awarded to anyone who managed to mine a block, and in fact anyone could do it using even a simple computer. To earn 2,000 BTC with mining you just needed to mine 40 blocks, and from August to November 2010 about 25,000 blocks were mined in total.
What is surprising, therefore, is not that the whale was able to accumulate 2,000 BTC in 2010, but that it has kept them for 14 years.
The movements of the whale
It is not known who owns those BTC, but it is unlikely to be an exchange, since at that time there were very few exchanges with insignificant trading volumes.
For example, it is enough to remember that it often happened that there were entire days without even one 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 at the time anyone could do it even with low-power machines.
Moreover, it has been since 2020 that that whale moves Bitcoin collected in the early years, probably always thanks to mining.
Actually, in this March 2024 he has already made three big movements, one on March 1st, always of 2,000 BTC, and another on March 5th of 1,000 BTC. In total, he has moved 5,000 BTC only in the month of March, for a value in dollars of about 350 million.
Probably this is also why the news did not trigger sales on the current market, since these movements have been going on for some time now.
Furthermore, it is not even known precisely what happens to those BTC once moved, because if they were sold on exchanges they could actually lower the price.
Since this is not happening, it is presumed that they have not been moved to be sold, also because the number of Bitcoins present on the known wallets of exchanges has been decreasing in the last 30 days.
The price of Bitcoin
Yesterday, however, the price of Bitcoin recorded some movement, although not as a result of this news, and with a practically zero final balance.
Before the opening of the US stock exchanges it was around $70,000.
Just before their opening, it had quickly risen to over $71,500, anticipating the clearly positive opening of the US stock exchanges.
However, as soon as the news spread that a US judge had rejected Coinbase‘s request to dismiss the SEC’s charges against the exchange, the price started to drop, reaching $68,300 a few hours later.
Once the trading session on the American stock exchanges was closed, the price of Bitcoin slowly returned to where it had started, namely $70,000, thus canceling out all the day’s losses.
It has been lateralizing around $70,000 since Monday, without having 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 14 with a new all-time high of $73,800, while the correction that started on the same day ended on Wednesday, March 20. From the same Wednesday until Sunday, it then rose back up to $70,000, and since then it has been trading sideways around this figure.
The hypothesis circulating is that the current sideways movement could continue at least until the end of the month, while starting from next week it could return to move significantly.