40 BTC were sent from an address which originally mined them back in 2009, a month after Bitcoin’s launch. While it’s possible that Satoshi himself is moving coins, the evidence suggests some other early miner is the owner. Interestingly, this early address was claimed by Craig Wright as one of his own in his ongoing trial, although he also claimed to have lost access to its private keys.Vintage BTC isn’t the only kind moving – some Bitcoins hacked from Bitfinex in 2016 were moved this week. The coins are worth about a quarter of a million Dollars at the current price. In total, 120,000 BTC was stolen from Bitfinex, worth about $1 billion today.Bitcoiners around the world celebrated the tenth anniversary of Bitcoin Pizza Day. This annual event commemorates one of the first recorded exchanges of Bitcoin for tangible goods; 2 Papa John’s pizzas which were exchanged for 10,000 BTC.
Popular crypto peer-to-peer lending service, BlockFi was hacked. Although no coins were lost, it seems that user data was exposed. Real names, email addresses, and other personally-identifying information was leaked, so if you are registered with the service exercise extra caution going forward.
Statistics show that over 70,000 BTC, a new record amount, were anonymized via the CoinJoin open source mixing service in May. Several popular wallets, such as Wasabi implemented the technique and it seems that financial privacy is of increasing importance in the crypto space.
Before we conclude, this week’s “Bitcoin quick question” is it possible to send a Bitcoin transaction without a fee?
Well, theoretically speaking it is indeed possible to send a Bitcoin transaction without a fee, under specific circumstances and with required technological knowledge.
However, in reality, for most users that’s just not the case.
The fees users add to a Bitcoin transaction are a part of Bitcoin’s mechanism. It incentivizes the Miners, who act as the network’s accountants and security guards, to include your transaction in the next block. In addition, transaction fees act as another layer of protection for the network against spam. If it were easy to send a Bitcoin transaction without fees, a malicious actor could spam the network with repetitive and unnecessary transactions.
There are, however, ways to reduce the fees’ cost, for example, you can use a SegWit wallet. For further details, visit the link in the description below.
Have a question you want us to answer? Just leave it in the comment section below. And if you want to support our videos, consider using the Brave browser for faster, ad free browsing that can also earn you rewards. Just visit the link in the description below.
That’s what’s happened this week in Bitcoin. See you next week.
Why you can trust 99Bitcoins
Established in 2013, 99Bitcoin’s team members have been crypto experts since Bitcoin’s Early days.
Weekly Research
100k+Monthly readers
Expert contributors
2000+Crypto Projects Reviewed
