New Study Examines Some of the Richest Bitcoin Wallets: Are They HODLers, Buyers, or Miners?

A new study by Diar analyzed wallets with over 200 Bitcoins and worth over $1 million. It found that 42 percent of these wallets had no outgoing transactions during the December 2017 peak. These wallet owners didn’t cash out when the market was high. 27 percent of these wallets had new Bitcoin added to them after December 2017. These Bitcoin owners kept buying while the price of Bitcoin was falling, demonstrating a significant degree of confidence from these investors. Though could these be the wallets of miners, who kept mining, rather than investors?

The study also found that 55 percent of all Bitcoins are within these wallets containing at least 200 Bitcoins, and a third of the Bitcoins in these high value wallets have never been used in a transaction. Of the active high-value wallets, five are known to be managed by major exchanges which together contain over 3.8 percent of all Bitcoins, worth about $4.2 billion.

A whopping 87 percent of all Bitcoins are in wallets containing 10 Bitcoins or more and worth over $60,000 each.

Early Bitcoin Miner Cashes Out 30,000 Coins

Cryptodaily picked up a tweet by a blockchain analyst who spotted a trend in the spending patterns of the early block rewards of Bitcoin. The analyst concluded from the chart that an early miner traded in coins on exchanges that had been mined as early as 2009. Though said miner could well have been mining Bitcoin before 2009 and have only used their newest coins mined so far.

Suggested Reading : Is solo mining Bitcoin still viable? Find out here.

The total sent to exchanges by the mystery miner between December 2016 and January 2018 was 30,000 Bitcoins, which even with Bitcoin’s peaks and troughs, is a very large fortune.

If we take Bitcoin’s value today, at the time of writing, 30,000 Bitcoin is equal to nearly $200 million.

“This miner has been cautious enough to first spend the youngest blocks in their possession as to not reveal the extent of their mining period too much,” said the observer Antoine Le Calvez. “So far, it seems it started mining around Dec 2009, but it could have been earlier.”

Considering the volume of Bitcoin held in early-owned and large wallets, these wallets and their Bitcoins are being closely monitored. Earlier this month it was suspected that a potential Silk Road accomplice had been selling off Bitcoin accumulated from the Silk Road website, around 110,000 Bitcoin in fact.

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