A few points of interest:The largest Bitcoin address in existence is:
1DkyBEKt5S2GDtv7aQw6rQepAvnsRyHoYMThis is not a very typical high balance bitcoin address, for several reasons.
For example:
- It's new money, not old coin.
- Has been accumulating wealth somewhat steadily since
late 2011 early 2012.
- The balance is not a nice round figure.
- Perhaps most importantly,
it's alive!
Now, interestingly:
- On July 17 this address had a balance of 517825 BTC.
- On July 17 Bitcoin looked on the verge of breaking 10 USD/BTC on Mt.Gox.
- On July 17 two large withdrawals of respectively 20000BTC and 60000BTC were made from this address.
- On July 17 someone sold tens of thousands of bitcoins at market price (instantaneously) in several batches.
Opening questions:- Are the several large dumps that occurred on July 17 consistent with the 80k BTC withdrawn from 1DkyBEKt5S2GDtv7aQw6rQepAvnsRyHoYM on that day?
- Is the time of the withdrawal roughly consistent with withdrawal -> transfer to and confirmation by Mt.Gox -> dump?
- Could 1DkyBEKt5S2GDtv7aQw6rQepAvnsRyHoYM responsible for the dumps of July 17?
Later that day: An (unauthenticated?) user going by the nick pirateat40 spoke on Freenode's #bitcoin IRC channel:
I assume this is (one of?) Pirate's wallets, and the main "Savings" part of BTCST.
I anticipated ~500K to be the balance of BTCST based on the premise that 1DkyBEK belongs to pirate before pirate himself claimed BTCST to be around 500K.
I predict you'll start noticing 1DkyBEK behaving quite differently after Aug. 17 than it has in the preceeding months up to Pirate closing shop.
The movements of July 17 were at the time unprecedented and would be an outlier, but have also been claimed by pirate himself.
If 1DkyBEK grows at a similar pace in the upcoming months, or eclipses the height of its former glory, my main premise will be proven wrong.
In a few weeks or months, not days, we can make a judgement. I think it's Pirate, if I'm wrong, we'll be able to tell soon enough.
Final Balance: 0.17055187 BTCLive balance chart on blockchain.info:
https://blockchain.info/charts/balance?address=1DkyBEKt5S2GDtv7aQw6rQepAvnsRyHoYMShow's over. Thanks for watching. Special thanks to bitcoin forensics crack
znort987 for his analysis.