Last week Bitcoin.com News reported that two old bitcoin addresses created in 2013 sent 10,001 bitcoins to countless wallets. Heuristics and clustering techniques showed that the bitcoins were associated with Mt Gox, which was around the same time the exchange was hacked in June 2011. Five days later, 5,000 bitcoins were transferred from a wallet created on the same day in 2013, and the stash of coins was also somehow associated with Mt Gox.
An on-chain story of 15,001 bitcoins
associated with the Mt Gox Saga.
Another, 5,000 so-called “sleeping bitcoins”from a wallet created on December 19, 2013, were transferred on September 4, 2022, as captured by Btcparser.comThis action was nearly nine years ago, in 2013. It took place five days after 10,001 bitcoins (BTC) were moved from two bitcoin addresses created on the same day. The 5,000BTC
sent on Sunday, September 4, 2022, has a mysterious history, being associated with the exact same time period that the now defunct Mt Gox bitcoin exchange was hacked in June 2011.
When the news desk reported 10,001BTCassociated with Mt Gox, there was not much fanfare about the coin moving. However, Coindesk columnist Jocelyn Yang discussed the situationwith a data engineer atCoin Metrics. That engineer stated that in 2013 bitcoin could have been associated with “an old Kraken cold storage address, a Kraken OTC (over-the-counter) transaction, [or] a Kraken user.” Then, on September 3, 2022,, an OXTresearcher, Ergobtcpublished, a Twitter threadciting OXT user Taisia, administrator of the GFISchannel telegram group, in our report citing.
“By referencing the work of well-informed OXT users, bitcoin.com is much closer to the target than Coindesk.” Ergobtc stated.” Despite Kraken deposits, these coins are not sourced from Kraken. However, they are sourced from Mt Gox and probably controlled by Jeb McCaleb.”
Ergobtc further described two addresses (1,& 2) and explained how OXT backtracks the source of the coins.” Doing so leads to large clusters with user annotations.” Ergobtc elaborated. “The user annotations to this cluster link to a blog post byIt links to a blog post by wizsecurity, Wizsec is an expert in the Mt Gox saga. The blog post belongs to Jeb McCaleb and mentions an address falsely claimed by CSW.”
The Twitter thread further describes a second transaction of 5,000 BTC“apparently made to Coinbase”; OXT researcheradded:
evidenced by a terting denomination split by up to 10 secondary splits; the BTC split is shared with Coinbase’s clustered addresses. These coins are sourced from the Gox saga and presumably controlled by Jeb McCaleb. 2 Tx for 5K BTCsent to Kraken and Coinbase.
Another strange transaction related to Mt Gox moves on Sept 4
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2022, block high 752,637, 5,000 sent BTC sent from “18xGHwas sent from “” and this address was created on the same day (December 19, 2013) as the two addresses that sent 10,001 BTCon Sunday, August 28 and Monday, August 29, 2022. Additionally, by backtracking transactions, 5,000BTCwere also associated with the Mt Gox saga, with the address “1McUC” At the time of writing, the address “bc1qp” was ” 4,929.43 ” held. It held BTCderived from the 5,000 sent on Sunday. By Monday morning at 8:00 a.m. ET, the coins were distributed to countless multi-signature bitcoin addresses.Bitcoin.com News spoke with the administrator of GFISchannel telegram group Taisia about the latest developments.
“The situation is quite strange.” Taisia told Bitcoin.com News.” oxt developer. He confirmed that, in his opinion, Bitcoin is indeed related to Mount Gox and may belong to Jed McCaleb.” Thatsaid the GFISchanneladministrator also spokewith Mark Karpeles, former CEO of Mt Gox, andsaid he “did not confirm this information directly, but he did not rule out that it was ‘close to the truth’.”
“If these are indeed McCaleb’s bitcoins, why hasn’t he issued a statement to stop speculation on this topic?” Taisia asked in a conversation with Bitcoin.com News.” And back to my original question, why are these developments happening now? In the midst of the FUD with the fiduciary payments and Vinick’s recent extradition to the US.”
Once again blockchain parsers, on-chain analysis, and heuristics have uncovered thousands of bitcoins with an interesting past. These ancient bitcoins have been asleep for nearly 9 years, only to awaken whenBTC was trading at $19.9K. It should be noted that these coins have absolutely nothing to do with the bitcoin payments associated with the Mt Gox trustee, except for the trustee’s latest updateand mere coincidental timing. Currently, Mt Gox creditors confirm that no firm date has been set for the payment distribution, despite rumors and inaccurate reports last week.
Image credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons, GFISchannel, OXT