The truth may shock everyone.
Old zombie BTC wallets are moving, what’s going on?
You all saw what happened a few days ago when 8 zombie wallets suddenly moved 80K $BTC (worth $8B) to new addresses.
Everyone thought these BTC were lost forever since those wallets hadn’t been active since 2011.
Then, out of nowhere, all of them woke up at the same time.
Most of these addresses got their BTC back in 2011, when 1 BTC was worth less than $1, meaning they’re up 100,000x today.
They could have taken massive profits way earlier, so why wait 14 years?
It’s clear something weird is going on.
BTC’s daily trading volume is about $50B, so selling $8B worth of BTC won’t crash the price.
But the real issue is the deeper questions this raises: did someone find a way to hack these old wallets? Is this organized? Or was it planned from the start?
One theory is that it’s a wallet provider who still had access to the private keys of inactive users and just emptied wallets that hadn’t been touched for years.
Back in 2013, one of these addresses was mentioned on a forum where a user claimed their BTC were automatically sent back to that address.
The user said he had sent 1.5 BTC to a friend, but the coins were instantly redirected to the address already holding 10K BTC.
This story dates back to 2013.
The problem is that there’s no on-chain trace of any 1.5 BTC ever being sent there.
That same address came up again on another forum in 2021.
This time, someone claimed he received 10K $BTC but lost the private key, which was on an old computer he sold.
The writing style shows these are clearly different people.
Honestly, I don’t buy the forum stories.
These posts pop up every time BTC rallies hard, looks like people hoping for a miracle way to get these 10K BTC.
They don’t even understand how Bitcoin works.
What’s odd, though, is that some of these wallets made test transactions in $BCH before doing the final ones in $BTC.
Since BTC and BCH share the same private key, it makes sense to test on the BCH network, which has less scrutiny, before moving BTC on mainnet.
This suggests it could be a hacker or someone who stumbled on a treasure trove of private keys.
Also, note that most of the BTC in these wallets was collected between April and May 2011, which lines up with the early days of Silk Road.
Everyone knows not all of Ross Ulbricht’s BTC were recovered.
These coins could be linked to Silk Road.
Maybe Ross told a trusted person where the private keys were hidden so they could be used or redistributed later.
Some people claim these old addresses were cracked using quantum computing.
That’s not true.
That might be possible if they were P2PK addresses, which expose the public key even before spending.
In that case, a quantum computer could theoretically derive the private key directly from the public key.
But all these addresses are P2PKH, where the public key only appears once coins are spent.
That makes it twice as hard for a quantum computer, it would first have to find the public key, which is impossible, and then break it to get the private key, also impossible.
So it’s double impossible instead of just one step.