Bitcoin whale watching is a sport for having fun, staying poor

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About 15 million people go whale watching every year — many in places like Mozambique, Costa Rica and Sri Lanka.

Stuck in Iceland, a travel magazine, labeled whale watching “a demanding contact sport where you battle the elements while looking for creatures that care nothing, whether you see them or not.

“Sometimes you are lucky, and the whales take a long time when they are visible. Sometimes they move fast, pop up all over the place, and you must be quick to see them.”

Today’s post celebrates Bitcoin’s version of the sport. So grab your spray jacket and binoculars, and let’s go crypto-catamaranning.

Thar she blows!

The earliest known efforts to find, track and even identify Bitcoin whales occurred in August 2013, as bitcoin was crossing over the $100 mark for the last time ever.

Prominent Bitcointalk user prophetx had proposed three whale-hunting commandments and encouraged others to join in:

Post any address holding in excess of 5,000 BTC ($500,000 then, $522 million now) in the last 90 days on a rolling basis.
Collaborate to identify the owner of the address, either in the real world or through their online footprint.
Use that information to map the biggest whales in the Bitcoin economy and follow the movement of their coins.

“Why?” was the first response.

“I study economics, so observing and studying the spending of the capitalist group is important to me,” prophetx said.

“It seems a bit creepy and stalkerish…,” replied another.

Prophetx: “This is no different than Forbes’ richest list. Bitcoin enables this and it should be used to advance knowledge. And if someone is that concerned perhaps they shouldn’t use a currency with a public tx ledger…”

Quickly, though, other whale hunters joined in. Within two days, someone had produced a rich list of about 300 addresses with more bitcoin than anyone else, discovered at 50,000 block increments (every 350 days or so).

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.

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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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