Crypto Data Analyst Antoine Le Calvez Reveals Early Bitcoin Miner Is Cleverly Cashing Out

If you are excited about the small bull run that Bitcoin has made recently, you have reasons to be worried. A recent analysis of spending patterns linking some of the earliest blocks of bitcoin has unveiled that a very early miner has been taking advantage of the last several years’ long-term upward trajectory to slowly cash out tens of thousands of coins since Dec. 2016.

A Tweet thread from prominent crypto data analyst Antoine Le Calvez has revealed that a mysterious bitcoin miner has managed to send approximately 30,000 BTC cryptocurrency exchanges between Dec. 2016, and Jan. 2018, probably cashing them out for a huge payday.

An analysis of the spending patterns of the earliest blocks of Bitcoin seem to indicate that a very early miner sent around 30k BTC to exchanges from Dec 2016 to early Jan 2018. pic.twitter.com/8SB89o80h3

— Antoine Le Calvez (@khannib) September 26, 2018

For those confused by the chart; X-axis is the block height, time flows to the left. Y-axis is when that block was spent, if it was, also expressed in height, the higher the dot, the most recent the spending. X-axis runs from 2009-01-03 to 2010-04-10.

According to Le Calvez, the obscure bitcoin miner has been smart enough to cash in on their youngest blocks of bitcoin to not expose the full scope of their mining period. It would seem that, at the latest, the mining started around Dec. 2009, back when the value of BTC wasn’t much above $0, still wasn’t anywhere near reaching dollar parity, and the flagship cryptocurrency could be profitably mined with a standard-issue CPU.

Besides, the researcher believes that this particular miner had mined for at least seven months. Through this time, he managed to acquire more than 30,000 BTC since block rewards were high and miners were few. He speculates that the miner could have even commenced mining operations earlier than Dec. 2009 since, recognizing that spending older coins is more likely to attract attention, he desires to conceal his sell-off.

For some, this may raise questions, such as whether the mystery wallet owner is not Satoshi Nakamoto himself, although the researcher seems to think otherwise.