$500 MILLION IN DORMANT BITCOIN MOVED IN AUGUST — FIVE TIMES JULY’S PACE — AFTER THE COLDCARD EXPLOIT AND TWO WALLET-MAKER BREACHES

Bitcoin doesn’t rot in a wallet, but the hardware protecting the keys can. 6,427.59 bitcoin, worth $507 million, moved out of long-dormant addresses in August — five times July’s pace, according to btcparser.com. Most of it traces to 2014, the same year that keeps coming up this summer: Coldcard’s firmware exploit, then breaches at Safepal and Trezor exposing names, emails, and shipping addresses tied to hardware wallet customers. One cluster tells the real story. Twenty-five addresses created in late 2014 sat untouched for over a decade. On August 19, twenty-two of them moved roughly 50 bitcoin each, within about an hour of each other. That’s not a person waking up nostalgic. That’s a script, a checklist, and someone who decided a decade-old setup was a liability, not a trophy. Self-custody was never about setting a key once and forgetting it. It’s about knowing when the hardware under that key stops being trustworthy, and moving before someone else finds out first. The bitcoin didn’t move because the price got interesting. It moved because the risk did. Your keys don’t have a domain to seize — but they do have a firmware version, and firmware gets exploited.