A 2019 WALLET MOVED 4,500 BITCOIN FOR 1,303 SATOSHIS — ABOUT $1.09 AT FRIDAY’S PRICE — AND SPENT EIGHT INPUTS INTO ONE OUTPUT TO DO IT

At 02:30 UTC on 25 September, in block 968483, an address that had not spent since April 2022 emptied itself. Four thousand four hundred and ninety-nine point nine nine bitcoin, in one transaction, for a fee of 1,303 satoshis. At eighty-four thousand dollars a coin that is about $1.09 to settle roughly three hundred and seventy-eight million.

Every number above is checkable in a minute, and you should check it rather than take it from us. The transaction begins 1541cf9c, the block is 968483, and the fee works out to 2.23 satoshis per virtual byte across 584 and a half virtual bytes. No bank confirmed it. No desk approved it. Nothing about it needed a business day.

Now look at what went in. Eight inputs, one output, and seven of those eight are dust. 546 satoshis, 294, 300, 294, 547, 294, 546. Those are the standard dust thresholds, the amounts too small for a wallet to spend on their own, not payments anybody meant to make. Somebody had been seeding this address with unspendably small sums and waiting for it to move.

So price the whole transaction and not just the fee. He paid 1,303 satoshis to the miners and carried 2,821 satoshis of dust he never asked for into his new address along with the rest. All eight inputs came from one address, so nothing new was linked here. The dust did not have to reveal anything to have been worth sending. It is cheap, it is patient, and it is sitting in a lot of wallets right now. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $83,289.