Satoshi-Era Coins Wake Up, Pay $1.22 to Move $8.3M — Pizza Money Still Beats Them 🍕

A batch of 100.02 Bitcoin mined in July 2010 moved on Wednesday for the first time in 16 years, according to blockchain data. At roughly $83,000 per coin, the stash was worth about $8.3 million when it left the original address. Based on Bitbo's highest registered BTC price in 2010, the coins were worth around $29 when they were mined.

The transaction was confirmed at 18:52 UTC in block 970,379, splitting the coins between two new addresses: 10 BTC to one and 90.02 BTC to the other. The holder paid a fee of 1,467 satoshis — about $1.22 for moving $8.3 million. Both destinations are modern bc1q addresses, a format that did not exist when the coins were mined. Moving coins between addresses is not the same as selling them.

Both pieces were mined within days of each other: 50.02 BTC in block 70,522 on July 26, 2010, and 50 BTC in block 70,748 on July 28. The two payouts were merged into a single transaction on July 30, 2010, landing in the address that just moved them. The mining reward has been cut in half four times since, most recently to 3.125 BTC in the April 2024 halving, so a block mined today pays one-sixteenth of what those two blocks did.

Galaxy Research confirmed the specific coins had been dormant since 2010. "This address has been somewhat active in the past, but these specific coins have not moved since 2010. We track the coins," the firm posted on X on October 8. The address itself has not been idle: it sent out 100 BTC twice on August 8, 2015, 100 BTC in December 2017 and 249 BTC in March 2018, but those were other coins, since the Bitcoin network tracks money as individual unspent transaction outputs.

Satoshi-era coins, named after Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto, have been waking up in clusters. In February 2025, a 50 BTC batch valued at $0.10 per coin when mined moved after about 15 years, by then worth roughly $5 million, with the holder skipping the usual test transaction. For historical context, 2010 was the year Florida programmer Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas, a bill of about $41 at the time.