On Friday morning, November 13, two Bitcoin addresses moved a total of 100 Bitcoin (BTC) for the first time since receiving the coins as mining rewards in September 2010. Worth about $6 in total at the time, the coins were valued at $6.89 million when they moved. The two addresses each transferred 50 BTC, just over two minutes apart.
About 59 BTC ended up at a single address
At 4:08 a.m. UTC, the first address split its 50 BTC block reward, sending 0.01 BTC to one address and nearly 50 BTC to another. Just over two minutes later, the second address sent 1 BTC to one address and nearly 49 BTC to another.
By 4:48 a.m. UTC, about 20 BTC from the first transfer and 39 BTC from the second had reached a new address beginning with “bc1qj5.” Within 40 minutes of the first transfer, the address held more than half of the coins from two block rewards that had sat untouched for over 16 years.
At the time of writing, three other addresses held the remaining coins, with balances of approximately 30 BTC, 10 BTC and 1 BTC. It remains unclear who controlled the two original addresses or why the coins moved. The transfers alone do not establish whether the addresses shared an owner or whether anyone sold the coins.
Each mining reward was worth about $3 in 2010
According to Whale Alert, the onchain monitoring platform that first reported the transfers, each 50 BTC reward was worth about $3 when miners received it. That puts the price of one bitcoin at roughly six cents in September 2010. With BTC trading near $69,000 on Friday morning, the two rewards were worth about 1.15 million times their original value.
The transaction records also reflect how Bitcoin payment formats have changed. Mempool data shows that the two rewards used pay-to-public-key (P2PK), an early format that locked the coins directly to a public key. All four addresses that received bitcoin in Friday’s first two transactions begin with “bc1q” and use the newer SegWit format.
Other Bitcoin rewards from 2010 have moved after years of inactivity
In July 2025, five block rewards mined in April 2010 moved to two SegWit addresses after about 15 years of inactivity. Each reward contained 50 BTC, bringing the total to 250 BTC, worth about $29.6 million at the time.
A larger transfer took place in March 2024, when a single transaction consolidated 40 mining rewards from 2010. Together, those rewards totaled 2,000 BTC, worth nearly $140 million at the time.
