- Last week, someone sent $1.1 million in BTC to the Genesis block address
- The coins are now almost certainly lost forever
- We look at three theories as to why this might have been done
On January 5 this year, someone bought 26.9 bitcoins worth $1.1 million from Binance and sent them to Bitcoin’s Genesis block address, the first block on the Bitcoin blockchain. Unless Satoshi Nakamoto comes back to claim them, these coins are now almost certainly irretrievably lost. But how, or why, did it happen?
Here are three theories doing the rounds.
Accident
People are sending crypto to the wrong address all the time, usually in small amounts. It’s easily done with addresses being so long and unwieldy. However, what usually happens in these situations is a slight error in the address, not a wholesale wrong address off the bat. For this to have been an accidental send, the sender would have had to have copied and pasted that address into Binance and confirmed the details at least twice before sending the funds.
We also need to bear in mind that we’re talking about more than a million dollars here, so the sender would almost certainly have been ultra-careful in all respects.
An accident is, therefore, highly unlikely.
A Thank You to Satoshi
Early Bitcoin addresses frequently receive small amounts of BTC that people seem to be sending as thank yous to its creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, for creating the protocol. This is all well and good, but sending almost 27 BTC is like dumping a million dollars into a wishing well.
Of course, if this person is a billionaire then they may not notice the loss, but it’s hard to fathom that this is simply a thankful person honoring Satoshi two days after the Genesis block’s 15th birthday unless they have a sensationally good reason for needing to get rid of the coins.
The Craig Wright Connection
A theory propounded by former Bitcoin developer Greg Maxwell, a defendant in multiple cases against Craig Wright, is that Wright’s financial backer, Calvin Ayre (he of the sensationally bad annual predictions) is behind it.
Maxwell suggests that Ayre sent the BTC to the Genesis block as the next installment for Wright’s case against the Open Crypto Patent Alliance (COPA), knowing that in order to access the funds (and therefore continue the case) he will have to extract them using Satoshi’s keys. This would, in essence, prove or disprove Wright’s claim once and for all.
This would represent a masterstroke by Ayre, but the pair’s history suggests that Ayre doesn’t have the backbone to attempt it; he has bought into Wright’s Satoshi claims hook, line, and sinker, and it would have to be a huge reversal in his mindset to stop now.
Wright claimed during his defamation trial against Hodlonaut last year that he destroyed the hard drive containing the keys to those early blocks in 2016 anyway, so in tapping the coins he would prove he lied there, too, although he would likely come up with an implausible and evidence-free reason why he could still access them.
