Bitcoin Mysteries, 9 Most Famous Bitcoin Wallets

The Genesis Address

The home of the very first Bitcoin ever mined, is the very first Bitcoin address owned by Satoshi. We have reasons to believe this one is controlled by Satoshi Nakamoto. Due to some technical issues, the BTCs have never moved. In another word, the technical issue stops the original 50 BTC from being transacted.

Total Received: 68.31077860 BTC
Current Balance: 68.31077860 BTC

Transactions: Some transactions are made which might not be of huge value but these steady amounts of transactions are made as a sign of gratitude toward Satoshi. One fun fact regarding this wallet is sentence cracked for creating it, «EThe Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks», which was originally the reason to start thinking about cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin per se. This one shows the history of the failure of banks which became front-page news with this title. People help the banks, although the incident was the bank’s fault. It seems that Satoshi conveyed an obvious sarcasm using this headline to tell people Bitcoin is the potential better way.

US Marshals 

The Bitcoins captured from the Silk Road website became the federal government’s assets. The site was designed for selling drugs, which ended up selling other underground stuff as well. This web site was under Ross Ulbricht’s supervision. It was auctioned by the federal government. Before the auction of this wallet along other U.S. Marshal controlled wallets, the federal government was the second-largest account holder after Satoshi.

Total Received: 29,658.81060 BTC
Current Balance: 0.00125581 BTC

Transactions: 29,658 BTC to Tim. They have sent some amounts to a dropper wallet, and some smaller amounts that were like tip.

The story: Silk Road, known as drug Amazon, was designed by Ross Ulbricht. Silk Road was designed to sell drugs although it ended up selling all kinds of underground goods. Ulbricht was captured in 2013 following by most of the other admins. They found out that Ulbricht was a liberal that believed in privacy and freedom. He claimed that people must be free to decide and act on their decision. FreeRoss was a move made by his mom to conveying the president to set him free. In this movement, his mom tried to show a different side to the story and prove that his son was a calm and pacifist person.

Laszlo’s Pizza Exchange

This was considered a turning point in Bitcoin’s history since it was the first business traded with Bitcoin. Which enabled Bitcoin to turn in to the physical world market. Laszlo bought 2 pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins he then posted the picture. This act became the first of its kind and happened in May 2010. Allowing the Bitcoin to be an option for real-world physical transactions, this idea made a great contribution to Bitcoin’s reputation. The wallet got well-reputed. Now with a simple google search, you can even find the original picture of the pizzas that were traded.

Total Received: 81,432.09 BTC
Current Balance: 0 BTC

Transactions: the wallet is famous for the transaction of 10,000 bitcoin for buying two pizzas.

The story: Laszlo claimed he doesn’t regret it and he is happy to be a part of this historical change. He still believes in buying goods with Bitcoin and tries to buy many things with cryptocurrencies.

“French Maid” aka DEA Carl M. Force 

The address belonged to Force one of the DEA agents working in Silk Road investigations. He used the address illegally to extract some Bitcoins from Ross Ulbricht’s wallet. Of course, this person and other culprits of the case eventually were imprisoned. Tigran Gambaryan was the person working on the case and capturing the French Maid. The case wasn’t that hard to solve since the email used was unencrypted, Gambaryan found the secondary email that the Bitcoins were transferred to as well, which led to Force’s account. The good point of this case was the fact that tracing the transactions on Blockchain is a way to solve investigations.

Total Received: 770 BTC
Current Balance: 0 BTC

The transactions: all the Bitcoins were transacted into Carl Force account in CampBX.

Largest Transaction Ever 

The owner of this wallet received the biggest transaction ever. This wallet holds the record of the largest transaction ever which was 500,000 BTC with the worth of $100,000,000 in April 2015. The amount would worth around 3.2 billion by now.

Total Received: 500,001.5 BTC
Current Balance: 0.6 BTC

Transaction: the largest transaction Bitcoin could imagine.

The story: Following these wallets and the amounts transacted into them, we get to the Mt.Gox exchange base. This exchange platform is a disgrace. It held a tremendously awful record in 2014 and 2011. Its record affected Bitcoin’s reputation as well, although Bitcoin was just the platform used. Mt.Gox eventually was bankrupt in 2014.

Bloomberg Reporter Gets his BTC pinched on TV

It became national news when the reporter of Bloomberg TV, Matt Miller, flashed his QR code and private key while reporting and Milkywaymasta, one of the followers of Reddit was keen enough to scan the QR and extract the fund into his account. He was genuine enough to inform the public about the incident and was willing to send the crypto back. Which he did after receiving a new wallet address from Matt Miller. This incident showed the importance of keeping wallets information secure since transaction with the codes is really easy. It also clearly showed Milkywaymasta’s goodwill.

Total Received: 0.237967 BTC
Current Balance: 0 BTC

Transactions: sending 0.029107 bitcoins into Milkywaymasta’s account and then back into another account owned by Miller.

Wikileaks Donation

During the time Wikileaks was financially blocked by the government, it used this address for the donations. Well, this is true that Bitcoin can circumvent the ban enforced by the banks and the governments.

Total Received: 4,043.48777578 BTC
Current Balance: 0 BTC 

Transactions: More than 26,625 transactions without even including personal donations.

Bitstamp Hacked

This wallet was the destination of all the funds transferred from Bitstamp hot wallets in January 2015. The transaction amount was over 19,000 BTC. There have been many hacking incidents that caused major loss while this one remained famous since Bitstamp continue its activities without interruptions and provided which shows the importance of customer’s privacy in the view of the platform.

Total Received: 19,949.962 BTC
Current Balance: 0 BTC

One Very Rich Identity

It’s one of the 9 accounts that all together contained approximately 66,000 BTC. Since all these accounts are connected via one single transaction, we can conclude that the account belongs to a single person or a group of people with over 550,000 BTC possession.

Total Received: 66,233.7638 BTC
Current Balance: 0.0038 BTC

Transaction: one transaction that connects this account to the other 9 accounts.

Conclusion

The cryptocurrency world is filled with such great transactions and interesting stories, some are myth some are true and some are designed to attract attention. Anyway, there are controversies even in the stories but they still make us think about the importance of innovations and how successful new ideas could be in the under progress world of cryptocurrencies.