Billion-Dollar Bitcoin Whale Concerns Investors
Bitcoin has been on something of a roller coaster ride over the last 18 months, not only with its value and pricing, but in terms of how it’s perceived. After 2017’s incredible gains, we fully embraced bitcoin as a commodity, and issues like the early September bitcoin bloodbath became serious matters with the potential to rob millions of significant financial assets. In other words, bitcoin got serious, not in theory or because of a given individual’s take on its future potential, but because of its very real impact on people around the world.
Once upon a time though, bitcoin was fun. That’s not to say there weren’t still financial implications in dealing with it, but it was something we could theorize about, and which even had mysteries surrounding it (not least of which was who in fact its creator was!). Well, every now and then some of this side of cryptocurrency becomes visible or apparent again, and it certainly happened this past week when a massive, previously dormant bitcoin wallet became active. It’s a $1 billion whale (which is basically just a term ascribed to massive bitcoin wallets), approximately, and after lying still for about four years it’s showing signs of activity.
Stepping back from the seriousness of the amounts involved for a moment, how cool is that? The idea of “whales” like these simply lurking in the bitcoin market with lottery winning-level wealth is really unlike anything else in the financial world. Even crazier is that there are believed to be hundreds of wallets with similar amounts stashed in them. That may sound outlandish to some, but consider how easy it once would have been to buy up a thousand bitcoins as a long-term investment play. The more difficult thing is hanging on long enough to turn significant profits into astronomical ones.
Of course, there is some concern involved when an account of this size starts moving as well. As one general bitcoin overview reminds us in the plainest of terms, the value of bitcoin can rapidly increase or decrease because it’s a young and emerging economy. And while most dramatic shifts are typically attributed to regulation or, in December of 2017, futures offerings, a stirring whale can certainly have a similar effect. That is to say, if these rumblings indicate something close to $1 billion might be sold off from a single wallet, it will be enough to shake up the entire bitcoin market.
Even so however, it’s okay to enjoy this one. While you should definitely keep an eye on the situation if you happen to have significant investments in bitcoin, there’s some fun to be had in imagining who might own this whale wallet, or what it must be like to be sitting on that kind of treasure trove. Speculation is already rampant around the internet, with some wondering about connections to the supposedly defunct Silk Road, and others even suggesting the wallet could belong to Satoshi Nakamoto himself. We’ll probably never know (that’s sort of the point of bitcoin, after all), but it’s definitely interesting to think about.
