Bitcoin Whale Watching: A High-Stakes Game for the Crypto-Obsessed
Tracking Bitcoin whales has become the ultimate spectator sport for crypto enthusiasts—equal parts entertainment and financial masochism.
Why watch when you could join? Because most ’whale watchers’ would rather gawk at billion-dollar transactions than make their own. The irony? These same observers often mock traditional finance for its passive investors.
Pro tip: If you’re spending more time analyzing whale wallets than building your own stack, you’ve already lost. The market doesn’t reward spectators.
In the future, bitcoin WOULD be worth much more than $500.
Among those whales was an address starting with “12ib7…” with 31,000 BTC — $3.1 million at 2013 prices and $3.2 billion today. It’s the 967th address ever created and was initially funded in May 2010.
The address can still be found on Bitcoin’s rich list, currently ranked 28th, closely trailing behind a Binance mining pool and cold wallet.
Prophetx’s thread never went far beyond that, with no whales identified under the actual post. Years later, as part of the depressingly long Kleiman estate court case, Craig Wright would falsely assert ownership of the address alongside others via Tulip Trust.
Wright had claimed that hackers had stolen the private keys and any backups were deleted — even though the coins in question had not been moved following the theft. He also attempted to sue Bitcoin developers into somehow granting control of the coins.
Of course, Wright ultimately lost the Kleiman case and was ordered to pay the estate $100 million, dropping the case against the Bitcoin devs shortly after.
So, who owns 12ib7? Nobody knows. 12ib7’s last outgoing transaction was in July 2010, when it directed 9,000 BTC to an unidentified address (its first outgoing transaction was also on this day in 2010!)
Much juicier: Coinbase director Conor Grogan got as far as potentially linking the address to Satoshi.
Loading Tweet..A so-called Patoshi address originally funded 12ib7 with 3,700 BTC. Patoshi addresses are believed to have mined bitcoin using a method that only Satoshi may have known was possible.
Whether that means Satoshi technically controls 12ib7 is unclear. All we know for sure is that the true owner was an early adopter and, for whatever reason, a Satoshi-linked wallet felt it necessary to send them thousands of bitcoin. Lucky them!
If they still have the keys, that is.
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