On Thursday, the final day of July, five ancient bitcoin block rewards from 2010 finally budged after sitting still for well over a decade. Worth close to $30 million, the stash was split between two freshly minted — yet still unidentified — Pay-to-Witness-Public-Key-Hash (P2WPKH) wallets.
15-Year-Old Bitcoin Rewards Spring to Life
Old-school holders continue to shift vintage coins, moving long-idle bitcoin that’s gathered dust for over a decade. Today marked July 2025’s first 2010-era activity, as someone finally transferred 250 BTC that had remained untouched for a staggering 15 years and 3 months. The funds originated from five legacy Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash (P2PKH) addresses, each moving 50 BTC, according to data from btcparser.com.
Source: Btcparser.com
These were all block rewards earned by a miner between April 18 and April 29, 2010. Of the 250 BTC moved, 150 BTC went to a brand-new Pay-to-Witness-Public-Key-Hash (P2WPKH) Segregated Witness address, while the remaining 100 BTC landed in another newly generated P2WPKH wallet. Earlier this month, headlines buzzed with stories of a major wave of 2011 wallet activity.
Just recently, more than 80,000 BTC tied to 2011-created wallets were routed to Galaxy for liquidation and subsequently sent to multiple centralized exchange (CEX) platforms for sale. Media reports labeled the coins “Satoshi-era” bitcoins — which is a bit misleading unless the coins can be traced back to block rewards from 2010 or earlier. Coins minted in 2011 don’t qualify for that title; only block rewards from 2009 and 2010 fall within the true Satoshi-era.
Although today’s spend involved 2010 block subsidies, they were mined just after Satoshi had exited the scene and ceased mining. Still, Whale Alert’s X account highlighted the event, noting that two of the coinbase rewards may still fit within the Satoshi-era bracket. “According to our research the two 50 BTC dormant address transactions earlier today were mined at the end of the period during which Satoshi was active (until around block 54,316),” the X account said.
Whale Alert added:
“However, it is very unlikely the blocks were mined by Satoshi. We will be publishing a full list of possible Satoshi blocks in the near future.”
