A bitcoin miner stumbled on an old wallet containing bitcoin he had mined back in 2010. According to the miner, they had mined the coins back then when it was still possible to do so with GPU. The old wallet held 1,000 bitcoins that had not moved for 10 years until the latest discovery.
At the time of the announcement on March 10, Bitcoin was trading at around $7,900 placing the worth of the fortune at around $7.9 million. Since the coins were first mined in August 24, 2010 and had not been moved since then, the miner can also claim an equivalent of 1,000 coins for every bitcoin fork since then.
The bitcoin blockchain has been forked several times with Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin SV (BSV) among the highly valued forks of the top cryptocurrency. An additional 1,000 BCH and 1,000 BSV add an extra $475,000 to the stash meaning this forgotten fortune is worth more than $8 million.
The news first broke out when the miner posted on popular bitcoin forum Bitcointalk, requesting help. They wanted to know how they could access the coins and sell them.
I haven’t been active here for a long time. How do I move my BTC to sell? I still have the wallet.dat file saved in thumb drive from back then. Also, do I have the same amount of BCH as I have in BTC? How do I move / sell BCH?
The Bitcointalk community offered great advice to the miner on the steps they could follow to recover the bitcoins and other forks such as BCH, BSV and Bitcoin Gold (BCG) among others. The community members also advised the miner on how they could move the coins to reputable wallets once they were able to claim them. Most importantly, they cautioned the miner to be wary of scammers that could potentially defraud them while pretending to help.
Later that day, a transaction of 1,000 Bitcoin was recorded on the blockchain from an address that was last active in 2010. Large sections of the crypto community believe that the wallet belonged to the miner.
There was also more speculation on Reddit that Coinbase was the recipient address with the miner preferring to use the exchange to cash out his fortune.
Two days later the miner returned to the Bitcointalk forum and posted
Thank you all for all the suggestions. It was overall a great return and the best welcome one can get!
Fair to say, it was worth the wait.
Image courtesy of Pixabay
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