An old miner with 80,000 bitcoins awakens after 14 years of slumber; I believe everyone has seen this.
I was curious and looked up the address; actually, there is currently [no direct evidence] that this is a miner from China.
To be honest, there were also relatively few miners in China in 2011, because at that time, let alone Bitmain, even the Avalon miner invented by Jihan Wu hadn't been created yet, and the Butterfly Labs miners in the US hadn't been released (this all happened around mid-2012), and the CatMiner came even later.
Chinese miners didn't start to dominate until these ASIC miners were primarily born in China.
Most of this miner's transfers were made in the first half of 2011, when it was truly in the pastoral mining stage imagined by Satoshi Nakamoto, using ordinary equipment.
Why do I say that he is most likely a miner? It is because he has many behaviors of collecting block rewards.
These 50 BTC, just take a look, are all newly mined block rewards at that time, and they are pure Bitcoin.
Interestingly, this old miner used addresses starting with 1 back then, and now he has transferred all these addresses to those starting with bc1.
So, what are the differences between addresses starting with 1, 3, bc1, and bc1p?
Addresses starting with 1 are the classic base58 addresses invented by Satoshi Nakamoto.
PS: The so-called Base58, compared to Base64, does not use easily confused letters and numbers: '0', uppercase 'O', uppercase 'I', and lowercase 'l'. You can look for it, Bitcoin addresses never include these letters and numbers. Do you see? Satoshi Nakamoto had already prepared for us clumsy folks.
After 2017, the Segregated Witness (Segwit) cap allows Bitcoin to place some minor transaction information outside the block, effectively breaking through the 1MB block limit, achieving soft scaling.
Addresses starting with bc1 and those starting with 3.
Thus, the native address of native Segregated Witness, bc1, was born, and transferring from bc1 to bc1 can cut transaction fees by almost half.
To cater to those who do not like Segregated Witness, a backward-compatible version was also born, which is the 3-prefixed address; the 3-prefixed address is also a bit lower than the 1-prefixed address.
Due to the use of Segregated Witness, the fee ranking is: bc1 > 3 > 1
In addition, relatively speaking, bc1 addresses are a bit safer; this is not from the perspective of anti-cracking — the anti-cracking ability of these three types of addresses is consistent, but bc1 addresses are safer in terms of verification.
1. This bc1 address is all lowercase, avoiding the previous trouble of distinguishing upper and lower case letters for Bitcoin addresses starting with 1 or 3.
2. This bc1 address has a better verification mechanism, reducing the likelihood of errors when inputting addresses. For example, if you mistakenly enter a bc1 address, the system is more likely to detect and correct the error, while the verification probability for addresses starting with 1 or 3 is lower.
As for the bc1p address, it is an address that supports Taproot; I have shared about Taproot before, you can look it up if you're interested.
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From this perspective, I also find it hard to believe the claim that this miner has 'served time.'
Because if I were a person who served time and had been out of touch with society for so long, I would most likely choose an address starting with 1, and it’s hard to believe a bc1 address, even though it is safer.
Only those who have experienced the disputes of the Segregated Witness era will recognize Segregated Witness, especially the native Segregated Witness address bc1.
After all, he has 80,000 bitcoins, so he doesn't care about this little transaction fee.
Of course, these are just my guesses; it is also possible that the Bitcoin wallet he used defaults to bc1.
I believe that in 2011, people interested in Bitcoin were most likely geeks. These geeks or early Bitcoin enthusiasts tend to have political inclinations regarding Bitcoin. Using addresses with different prefixes also represents their part in the political spectrum of Bitcoin.
Of course, in the end, it’s a simple hope 😂, hoping that he is just switching to a better and more advanced address, rather than preparing to cash out and leave.
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