Recent years have seen a rise in the number of miners with Bitcoin stashes from the 2010 timeframe. Those Bitcoin miners have waited for a long time, even entire years without touching their digital assets, before they would debut their comeback. In other words, sleeping whales are about to wake up and take action.
A Bitcoin wallet that has been dormant for 11 years comes to life with a stockpile of about $3 million.
At the time of purchase, Bitcoins were worth less than $1. Since then, its value skyrocketed and this brought the miner a considerable amount of fortune.
Patience Is the Key
A Bitcoin miner received 50 BTC on May 17, 2010, and didn’t do anything with it for a period of 11 years.
The activity was detected on the address on this year’s October 22. The patient miner is to reap the benefits that were accumulated for an entire decade. He finally got his well-deserved reward. It was reported that the miner turned his reward into cash ten years later and became rich because of it, the wallet was in motion.
The full 50 BTC could have been purchased for less than $4 in 2010. However, today, the price of one Bitcoin exceeds $60,000, resulting in a huge $3 million profit for the miner.
If the miner decides to sell his holdings, he will make a phenomenal gain of over 76,000,000% within 11 years. It definitely pays to be patient in the crypto market.
Bitcoin block incentives for miners were fixed at 50 BTC at the time, and the halvings were set every other four years. The reward per block has been halved three times and is now 6.25 BTC.
Given the asset’s rising price trajectory, mining Bitcoin has become a profitable business more than ever before, even taking halvings into consideration.
Actually, some think that it is exactly thanks to these halving events that Bitcoin’s reached new records. Since the last halving in May 2020, prices have more than doubled.
Not The Only Sleeping Whale
Sleeping whales are not something new in the crypto section and there is certainly a great number of them. In the Bitcoin ecosystem, early Bitcoin miners have created a reputation of their own. These early BTC miners before 2011 mined the coins and didn’t touch them since, therefore, they are called the ‘zombie Bitcoins’ within the crypto market.
Some consider that these Bitcoins will never again see the light of day, however, others believe that they could only be awaiting the proper moment to awaken from their slumber.
Recently sleeping whales from that era seems to have wakened up, which supports the second aforementioned thought.
In recent years, a few of the 2010 miners have moved their BTC, as reported by data from btcparser.com. One enormous whale from that timeframe was discovered to have transferred 6,000 bitcoins, with 4,250 BTC being moved out of that number in 2021.
Also Read: PayPal Co-founder Peter Thiel Regrets Not Buying More Bitcoin