Bitcoin Forum

Like people who explicitly bought or mined bitcoin with literally zero KYC back in the day when it was easy to do that. And are now moving the markets buying and selling. Is that still a thing or not?

Or have pretty much all of the ancient whales touched an exchange or cashed out?

You can still buy/sell/mine bitcoin without KYC.

Its hard to move market by buying/selling especially if you want to stay anonymous (without touching big exchanges)

There are tone of big bitcoin address that wake up after decade. Just type "bitcoin whale wakes up" in google and you will find out that more or less once per month there is new FUD article about ancient whale waking up. Often called "satoshi era bitcoin wallet"

In any markets, there will always be bigger entities that will have a good amount of influence over the markets.

Bitcoin is pseudonymous, so there really isn't much way to know unless they publicly disclose their positions (which they obviously wont, because it's obviously not a good idea).

This is still a thing, although not as big as it used to be.


No one way to know that. Most of the bitcoin addresses that you see that doesn't have its contents moved for a long time can easily be assumed as an 'early adopter' wallet, although there are also a good number of those untouched addresses that may no longer be accessible. You can always get a good guesstimate, but unless one such whale confirms that he/she is still active and still is a whale at this point, you will never know who are the ones that are still around.

It depends upon individual users and the time they sold their coins and through which medium, if you are planning to sell huge number of coins now a days, you need to verify your KYC with a centralized authority to carry on with the transaction now a days, but if you are planning to sell small amounts you can use DEX to trade without worrying about verifying anything. Things are changing with time and in the future we might be forced to carry on verification even for small amounts.

The possibilities could be many:

1. Having cashed out
2. Having lost their access to wallets
3. Some have possibly (god forbid) left us, without informing their next-in-kin about their bitcoin holdings.

The maximum I see about such whales is sudden news articles about some bitcoin whale address moving funds - this is a nice method to generate a lot of FUD and eventual market drop in bitcoin price, it is safe to ignore these news articles and stay away from trading for a few days surrounding such events.

It is easier to mine Bitcoin in early days of Bitcoin network but not all of miners and even investors in early days actually managed to keep up access to their wallets.

Later they lost their Bitcoin and it is not absolutely correct but from hodl waves, you can estimate millions of Bitcoin likely was lost.

Depends on what you use to estimate lost Bitcoin: 5yr+ or 3yr+, the possible lost Bitcoin accounts for 11% to 25% of circulating supply.

https://www.lookintobitcoin.com/charts/hodl-waves/

For a brief second I thought this was a discussion about actual ancient whale species that have yet to be discovered. Unfortunatelly, I was wrong XD On the actuall topic, recently I watched a docu with a hacker Gummo on the Soft White Underbelly channel where he talks about early BTC mining and amount he was able to acumulate in the early days, and honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot more like him that mayve only tuched a small percentage of their accumulation.

I guess when bitcoin becomes an asset, store of value or even currency, the narrative has change. And then there are world financial bodies that want to control it, imposing KYC's. So yeah, that thing is gone already.


Maybe some of them haven't touch their bitcoin or cash it out. Others may have done it in succession every bull run, like in 2017 or 2021. Or some may have totally lost their access already, like this guy:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/15/uk-man-makes-last-ditch-effort-to-recover-lost-bitcoin-hard-drive.html

I think we should mark them as temporary loss because there are  news in the past that there are some old wallets that successfully recovered and dormant wallet for a long time become active again. We don’t know exactly if this wallets is really permanently or recoverable.

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This data can be determine easily using glassnode analysis but since it needs premium access to view chart. It will be hard to determine exact numbers of whale wallet that has no activity for a long time.

the ancient anonymous whales I think still exist and they continue to monitor this market. Occasionally perform manipulations to increase their bitcoin assets.
But we also don't know how they move. There are some wallets with millions of bitcoins still not moving and some other wallets are starting to move towards the exchange.
who were the ancient whales and who were they, how many were they? Of course at this time there will be no answer because all are anonymous.