Yesterday afternoon something special happened: a whale sent the biggest Bitcoin (BTC) transaction ever.
Although that in itself is quite special, there is also something else going on with this payment. The owner left a mysterious message in the blockchain.
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Bitcoin transaction
Because the blockchain is public and transparent, anyone can view it. But because you can enter the network pseudonymously and enter your own private key anonymously, you still have financial privacy. Partly for this reason, we do not automatically know who is behind this large transaction.
So we can get more about this transaction out of the blockchain. The payment entered the blockchain yesterday at 15:58 in block 654.364. And then the most important thing of this transaction: the amount.
A total of 88857.24519026 BTC has been sent and divided into two new UTXO’s of about the same amount. The payment was split into ~43,185 BTC and ~45,671 BTC.
If you convert that with the current spot price we can conclude that for $1,155,141,000 the owner has changed hands.
Let that sink in for a moment: more than $1 billion in assets were sent with a decentralized protocol that no bank or payment processor could do anything about.
The payment totalled only 405 bytes. As a result, it only cost 0,00027847 BTC. With the current market price, that comes down to $3.65. The transaction costs are therefore less than 0.0000004% of the total amount.
Secret message
If you search through the blockexplorers for this transaction you will come across mysterious things. Part of this Bitcoin has already been broken down into a lot of small transactions. Pay attention to the addresses. using vanity addresses, the whale has left a message.
Let’s use full power of anonymity. See memo.sv/topic/hmwyda.
In total, there are hundreds of transactions done each 0.00000547 BTC. The first six addresses point you to memo.sv. But here the trail is still dead end.
It is not the first time this message has been used in a payment. Tiffany Harden has been keeping an eye on this pattern for a while now. It is not yet clear what message this whale wants to convey through this mysterious message.
By the way, these things also happen on Bitcoin Cash. Besides that, the memo seems to make a link to the Bitcoin SV blockchain. There are rumors that dust is made to increase anonymity. But then the link to the memo is very special again. There will undoubtedly be a lot of discussion about this mysterious case in the near future.