I'd take issue on two points. First, "wallets' don't exist in the Bitcoin protocol. Second, the tool being used is not sophisticated enough to list the inputs and outputs, giving the false impression that something unusual is "unknown." Try this link to get details:<p><a href="https://blockstream.info/tx/4410c8d14ff9f87ceeed1d65cb58e7c7b2422b2d7529afc675208ce2ce09ed7d" rel="nofollow">https://blockstream.info/tx/4410c8d14ff9f87ceeed1d65cb58e7c7...</a><p>There are numerous inputs and a single pay-to-script-hash (P2SH) output.<p>The relatively high fee is due in part to the large number of inputs. ~400 satoshis/byte is high by today's standard but not too unreasonable as early as 2017.<p>We can't tell anything about the identity of the owner(s) of the new coin from the block chain alone.<p>Making a transaction this large is a security risk. It effectively establishes a billion dollar bounty for any party who can rewrite enough blocks to erase it. Now that the value resides in a single coin, any subsequent transaction faces the same risk. Plunking this much value into a single coin seems like an odd strategy at best. Not to mention the destruction of privacy in combining all those inputs into a single transaction with a single output.<p>I can think of one reason you might want to do this. A consortium/trust has formed in which individuals pay into a common pool of money. That money is then protected with a multi signature script (consistent with the P2SH type). Given a threshold of signatures, the money can be spent, subject to other constraints. These will remain unknown until the first payment is made. At that point we'll know the number and identity of all the eligible keys and the threshold needed to make payment.<p>If so, this transaction can be thought of as a kind of digital charter for the consortium in that it defines how the money can be spent going forward.<p>Edit: to be clear, the "bounty" I'm talking about can't be directly claimed just by mining some blocks. Instead, it would have to be claimed as part of a double spend of either the transaction in question or as subsequent transaction of the now-enormous output. Most likely, there would be collusion of some kind between a miner and the owner of the keys. I'm not saying this will happen, but the bigger the transaction, the greater the risk.
I can count maybe 5 people in the crypto space that would have that much BTC, but none of them would be dumb enough to put it all in one wallet. Most likely some large institutional investor decided to re-key their cold storage wallet.
From the top twitter comment:
> 0.06BTC in fees? Why so expensive?<p>Just gotta say, its pretty amazing we live in a world where 1 billion dollars can get transferred pseudo-anonymously in a reasonable time frame, only costing the transfer party $600. As a really stupid, non-real-world comparison, Western Union has a transfer limit of $2500 per transaction, and a $20 fee per transaction. If you were to initiate a $1,000,000,000 transfer it would take something like 400,000 transactions costing you something like $8 million dollars in fees.
This was probably an internal transfer, but if it was payment to someone, something interesting then occurs.<p>It then becomes valuable for the original owner to secretly mine a chain, attempting a 51% attack. They could run the attack secretly for up to 40 days and still make a profit.<p>So you'd really need to wait 40 days before you can be sure this transfer is safe.<p>But it gets scarier, if at the end of the 40 days a longer chain is submitted, all transaction since this one would be reverted too.<p>So when giant transfers happen, all transactions are vulnerable to long term 51% attacks. So all transactions sent now on Bitcoin aren't secure until this 40 day window has passed.<p>Of course, I don't think that's the case here, it was probably someone moving his own coins around, not a payment to anyone.
Imagine how much money you could make by creating a bogeyman bitcoin wallet!<p>Step 1, Consolidate 94,000 BTC into one single address the entire crypto world is now watching.<p>Step 2, Send 1,000 BTC from bogeyman bitcoin wallet to exchange crypto wallet.<p>Step 3, Freak the shit out of the market. Promptly sell the entire lot in one single market sell order.<p>Meanwhile you've got another 50,000 BTC or whatever sitting on contracts leveraged with 100x margin in a short position across multiple accounts... essentially netting you 100,000 BTC profit if you can manage to tank the price just 2% on the 3 funds that Bitmex follows to create their index price... and you totally would selling 1,000 BTC at once from a well known superwallet.<p>Rinse and repeat... Eventually, I imagine you wouldn't even need to sell the coins on the exchange... just moving them there would be enough... (which would probably be illegal at least in the USA, see below)<p>And when the market gets wise... and everybody else starts shorting the price when you move your coins... you BUY 1,000 BTC in a single market order... stop hunting everyone's "sure things" (with mostly tight stops) and probably making you 500% return on a 5% move the opposite way... placed on longs of course.<p>(I am working on an algo bot, I think about this kind of stuff all day long!)<p>I had better start saving!<p>Side question... would this be legal? Moving the coins to exchange, signalling that you were going to sell based on precedent, and then not selling would be illegal by the nature of equities laws on fake bid or ask walls to move the price... like some trader at goldman was just arrested over for doing the same in the gold markets.<p>But just selling a lot of coin while you have another lot of coin in short positions would be perfectly legal, right?
I worked in the trading dept of a large hedge fund and this could easily be them, or someone like them. They regularly traded several billion in bonds, currencies and short rates each day and just aren't used to those trades posting publicly (outside the exchange). I can see them seeing this Twitter thread, scratching their head and wondering, "what's the big deal?"
This shows where the funds came from
<a href="https://twitter.com/thetokenanalyst/status/1169929738607124482" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/thetokenanalyst/status/11699297386071244...</a>
As far as the fees being so cheap, and every one else guessing about how expensive it would be to do it in a normal banking situation, F. Scott Fitzgerald is relevant:<p>"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different." (The Rich Boy, 1926)<p>All of the information normal people--like you and me--use to price transactions like this is completely irrelevant. Rich people have access to many services and price structures that are completely different than normal people. Any guess about what it costs to make a transaction like this via normal channels is likely completely wrong (other than "free", assuming they are doing business with the bank in question).
Interesting theory via Twitter:<p>> If you look at BCH and BSV you will see the coins also moved - this looks like someone moved to do a split of forks. The good news (if that is the case) is that this likely will mean sale of BCH and BSV, not BTC!<p><a href="https://twitter.com/shanepicker/status/1170517377441849351" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/shanepicker/status/1170517377441849351</a><p>If that's the case, it implies that someone is looking to liquidate the value of their BCH/BSV they got for free in the forks, and need to move the BTC too since otherwise the transaction would be valid in all 3 chains.
Unknown just means whale alert doesn't display it?<p>Transaction with addresses: <a href="https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/4410c8d14ff9f87ceeed1d65cb58e7c7b2422b2d7529afc675208ce2ce09ed7d" rel="nofollow">https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/4410c8d14ff9f87ceeed1d65cb...</a>
Is it a billion dollars, though? I mean, if you started selling them, the market price would likely go down. In other words, are there enough people looking to buy 94504 BTC at current market value?
Ok, slightly offtopic and rant, but:<p>My main problem with Bitcoin, etc. is: it is just too complicated.
I mean, I did study CS and do have some knowledge about math and cryptography and I followed Bitcoin from the beginning with curiosity - and I still only have a vague understanding of it all. Now sure, I could invest some days and really study it and things would probably look different. But if it is hard for me, how hard is it for the common person?!<p>I believe the base of a new money-system should be simple, for (allmost) everyone to understand. Because yes, the current mainstream fiat money banking system ... is not simple at all, either.
But if it is so complicated, only some people can understand it, than there is way too much room for fraud ...
Tangentially related - a couple of the guys who did the "Mic Dicta" podcast (an interesting and funny legal podcast, sadly now defunct) just recently started another podcast called "ALAB" and put up a brilliant episode going over Craig Wright's recent Bitcoin travails in court: <a href="https://soundcloud.com/alabpodcast/episode-3-faketoshi-the-perfect-client" rel="nofollow">https://soundcloud.com/alabpodcast/episode-3-faketoshi-the-p...</a><p>Sharing as a comment here since it maybe doesn't make sense as a submission on its own, and since there's likely a number of people in the comments of this story who would enjoy it
wow. So if someone has looked, could you summarize the history of the sending address? (When did it have transactions, etc.)<p>Also, if someone wanted to turn this into fiat currency over a short but not instant period of time (such as 1 month for example), could they get close to 1,018,147,922 USD or even over 30 days would that diminish the price too much?<p>(I am thinking for example if an institutional investor early on bought 94,504 bitcoins and "just realized" they have it or something, but only really cared about dollars or their fund is over and they have to pay out the cash or whatever. For whatever reason, if they want cash now.)<p>Thanks for any expert opinions.
According to tokenanalist.io, this is a funds consolidation associated with Huobi exchange: <a href="https://twitter.com/thetokenanalyst/status/1169929738607124482?s=20" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/thetokenanalyst/status/11699297386071244...</a>
There are what, about ~2,000 billionaires in the world? Of those, I don't believe any of them would hold a billion in BTC. From what I can tell, it has been ruled out that this is from any of the exchanges. Is this a possible nation-state transaction?
The thing about large sums of bitcoin is that they aren't worth what the conversion rate says they are. Trying to spend 95 thousand bitcoins would shatter the market and send the value of a bitcoin way, way down.
Nice Szabo: "Such confidence in Bitcoin is splendid, but a 94,500 BTC tx tempts fate. If recipient can make that much from reversing the tx, they can afford to run a 51% attack for more than 40 days. Big if & very visible, but security here depends more on trust & less on the protocol itself."
<a href="https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/1169848736819773440" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/1169848736819773440</a>
Is there a scenario where systematically concentrating outstanding BTC into a few massive piles can be used to destabilize the whole BTC infrastructure?
Most of the comments in this thread are unaware of offline transactions. <a href="https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Offline_transactions" rel="nofollow">https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Offline_transactions</a><p>Furthermore, Bitcoin mining is run by pools. Only the pools have to be hacked for a 51% attack to occur.<p>I haven’t read all 500 comments in this thread, but they all largely seem to be the same.
I wonder if this if at all related to the news about Sackler transferring funds to offshore accounts<p><a href="https://edition-m.cnn.com/2019/09/13/us/sackler-family-purdue-pharma-case/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://edition-m.cnn.com/2019/09/13/us/sackler-family-purdu...</a>
Well now that I have a place to ask this question...<p>Could someone explain to me about 51% attacks and if bitcoin is vulnerable to one?<p>Hypothetically, a government decides to put forward enough resources to perform a 51% attack on bitcoin. Is that possible? If not, why? And is this something to actually worry about, or could something be done to combat it?
Damn Gina, that's a lot of coin! but that's less than 1/2 of 1% in existence. There will be many more of these kinds of transactions!<p><a href="https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/how-many-bitcoins-are-there/" rel="nofollow">https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/how-many-bitcoins-are-th...</a>
In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with the fact that people want to secure their funds and make certain transactions by transferring money from one wallet to another.
It’d be very interesting if this was part of the court ruling against Craig Wright: <a href="https://cointelegraph.com/news/craig-wright-challenges-court-order-requiring-him-to-pay-500k-bitcoin" rel="nofollow">https://cointelegraph.com/news/craig-wright-challenges-court...</a>
dupe of <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20896032" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20896032</a><p>Went under the radar on HN like 3 days ago
Interesting. There are 17~18 million BTC in existence[1], so this makes up for about half of a percent of total BTC.<p>(of course a lot of those BTC are lost forever due to forgotten keys, hard drive crashes, thrown out hard drives, etc, so who knows what the actual amount of accessible BTC is).<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/how-many-bitcoins-are-there/" rel="nofollow">https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/how-many-bitcoins-are-th...</a>
<a href="https://twitter.com/juanbiter/status/1170014648684490757" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/juanbiter/status/1170014648684490757</a><p>A few hours ago several #xcoin txs were made consolidating 94.505 #BTC in now the 5th largest address 37XuVSEpWW4trkfmvWzegTHQt7BdktSKUs, they have been accumulated since 2016<p>Is associated with
@BAKKT
due to its launch today (deposits and withdrawals) 🧐
I thought this was going to be a genesis transaction and Satoshi would ride out of the sun on a flaming chariot of bitcoin.<p>Probably just Elon letting his GF fiddle with his Trezor.
Probably related to Bakkt. The interesting thing here is how inexpensive was the transaction fee. How does banks transfer this kind of sum and how much would it cost?
Interesting, HN articles about bitcoin typically have a few "tulips", "ponzi" and "obvious scam" comments.<p>But none yet here. Is HN finally warming up to bitcoin, 10 years after it was invented?
By “unknown”, does that mean that none of the source addresses that collectively sent the sum to one address did not have previous transactions from sources that were known? I rather doubt it, unless the sources were mining wallets (which would show up as coin bases).<p>On my phone I’m not going to research it :)
Watching things like this, I think bitcoin could eventually replace the government-backed currency.<p>Everyone can watch them move. If you spend 1$ from that wallet to buy even a mars bar, your identity will be known to others. How CLEAN and clear is that?