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Bitcoin isn’t just Bitcoin.

There are venture capitalists, research and policy institutes, advisory businesses, conferences, software studios and missionary-style initiatives all operating in Bitcoin’s mighty expanding orbit.

And, of course, there’s the media.

Today’s post is a little inside baseball about news. 

Bitcoin news (and crypto news more broadly) has clearly defined tropes. But they aren’t static. 

Tropey headlines tend to play on our base instincts. Fraud stories were historically a go-to for legacy and mainstream outlets looking for a quick hit about crypto — “Bitcoin Thief Allegedly Bought Royalty Rights to Rap Songs, Has Middling Taste” from VICE in 2019 is a prime example. 

That story, and others like it, had less to do with Bitcoin and more to do with crime, but the crime itself wasn’t particularly interesting. Bitcoin brought the novelty factor to an otherwise dull low-level crime. Consider your click harvested!

Over time, those types of stories have given way to a trope more relevant to bitcoin holders: “Old whale moves coins for the first time in ages.”

The most recent iteration has played out this month. Across two weeks, an address dormant since 2011 transferred a total of 80,009 BTC ($9.3 billion) to Galaxy Digital. 

Come this morning, Galaxy had directed more than 10,000 BTC ($1.2 billion) to a number of exchanges across an eight-hour period. 

The price of bitcoin slid nearly 2.5%, from about $118,000 to under $115,300, before recovering slightly.

Around the same time, a separate whale awoke to move almost 3,963 BTC ($462.5 million) between addresses, although at this point it doesn’t appear to have made it to any exchanges.

We don’t usually get any closure when these types of transfers happen. In the past five years or so, there have been at least a dozen other instances of dormant Bitcoiners awakening to shuffle coins amounting to over 195,400 BTC ($22.8 billion) when combined, by my very quick count.

Of that dozen, only three are believed to have led to coins actually being sold on exchanges, including this morning’s situation with Galaxy. The possibility does exist that each of the others were peer-to-peer, over-the-counter sales, but we’ll never know for sure.

Still, the “dormant whale moves bitcoin” trope is the perfect blend of feel-good and abject terror. 

We’ve all heard the horror stories about lost private keys to bitcoin fortunes, and maybe even lived a few of them ourselves. Hearing about old coins being accessed for the first time in a  decade is the great antidote.

Meanwhile, the notion that the 30% of all coins which haven’t moved in at least five years — almost six million BTC, worth $696 billion — might one day be suddenly sold is a little scary, depending on how heavy one’s bags are.

Which makes for perfect clickbait, no matter how scant the details.

— David

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