111k BTC on the lose: Full story & 5 cryptocurrency trading tips
Cryptocurrency is not a secret sauce anymore, everyone talks about it and everyone keeps an eye on it. That being said, a Redditor posted a transaction that the user had been tracking. Unlike the regular transactions, this particular transaction was not normal to see.
The amount involved is staggering, its almost a billion dollars, $844 million to be exact.
In this post, we shall talk a bit about it in detail and we will also share 5 cryptocurrency trading tips that will help you mount your profits higher. That being said, let’s dive in directly.
BTC & BCH worth $1bn is on the move. Where is it being transferred?
If not already known, Mt. Gox is considered to be the biggest Bitcoin exchange platform in the history of Bitcoin with a 70% of market share in 2011. That is, all the Bitcoins that were in the market (mined & in circulation) 70% of those entered the Mt Gox ecosystem at least once. Furthermore, it has also been the biggest cryptocurrency hack in the history of blockchain technology.
The cryptocurrency hack on Mt Gox was worth, $488 million ($460M lost & 28M went missing) in 2011. And in today’s date, the hack is worth more than $3.5 billion. That’s a huge number for anyone to stomach it. As per the reports, the Bitcoins were laundered on another exchange, BTC-e. The owner of BTC-e was Alexander Vinnik taken down by the Greece court and further forwarded the case to US Jurisdiction.
Now let’s talk about the Silk Road. Silk Road is an online black market to trade drugs illegally. The Silk Road was first launched in 2011 as the ‘first modern darknet market’. The platform enabled users to buy and sell illegal drugs with complete anonymity. Furthermore, the Silk Road was shut down by FBI in Oct’14. Silk Road 2.0 was again started and again shut down by FBI a year later.
This time, the owner of Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht was arrested & sent to life prison. Needless to say, Silk Road used Bitcoins as a mode of payment and it charged a certain amount of fees per transaction. What do you think happened to these Bitcoin Silk Road earned? If you are wondering how are these two companies related to the transaction mentioned in the Reddit post, we’ll share more details in a bit. Keep reading
As per the post on Reddit, the wallet owner initially had 111,114.62 BTC/BCH. Over the years, the user has been transferring bitcoins to sub-wallets in a particular fashion. The first transfer to the sub-wallet happened 4 years and 5 months ago (9thMar’14). Starting with 60,000 BTC then 20,000/10,000/1000/500 and now 100 coins.
Checking the history of the transaction, it is clear that the wallet was ice cold with no transactions at all. But since last week, the owner of the wallet is transferring coins in bits & pieces to the sub wallets. Take a look at the summary of the wallet that captured the viewer’s attention.
Initially, the wallet owner was assumed to be someone who either stole Silk Road’s Bitcoin or it’s the FBI who are auctioning the Bitcoins. Second probable owner of this wallet is Mt. Gox owner, Max Karpeles or someone part of Mt Gox, who is selling bitcoin to return the investor’s money as promised at the time of filing bankruptcy.
Third possible owner of the wallet is DPR seized coins. However, it’s unlikely to be this as there is just one link to two sub-wallets containing 0.001 BTC.
The user went on to dig deeper and found that Mt. Gox moved coins right after bankruptcy was filed by the company. Furthermore, the transactions looked similar to the transactions that happened a month before Mt Gox was hacked.
If you look at the overview of this address, you’d see that the wallet has been dead for past 4 years and 5 months. And then suddenly, after 4 years there have been 1964 transactions from the address to sub wallets.
Bitcoins, in very smaller portions, have been transferred to sub wallets that is suspicious enough to predict that this is someone with really plan to encash it into fiat money. The block number 539113 alone is worth 5,813.33290340 BTC.
Another peculiar transaction that happened from this wallet address is a transfer of 111,114.61735989 BTC. This wallet has been active since Jul’11 and the last transaction happened yesterday, again of a very small fraction of a Bitcoin.
Considering the Bitcoins in the wallet, almost everyone agrees that this might be Mt Gox who was ordered to rehabilitate the investor’s money back. Furthermore, Mt Gox is expected to refund the investments from early 2019. This can be the preparation for those refunds that’s about to happen the coming year.
“You realize we’re talking about washing the coins, right? Anyone that controls the private key to the wallet controls the coins obvs. But if you want to cash them out to fiat you need an exchange. If you don’t wash the BTC before importing into an exchange that converts to fiat, then the exchange can ID you. And upon subpoena by a government, you become ultra mega screwed. Converting to monero is a common untraceable way to wash coin. The paper trail of these BTC to monero will be broken. Once you have monero, then you can buy ETH, or BTC, or whatever fiat conversion exchanges accept and cash out. The trick will be not to do it with too much at once. But 10 million at a time nobody can track.” A user commented on the post.
What will happen to the market now?
SEC and many cryptocurrency megaminds belive that the market would dip a little bit in terms of the price of Bitcoins.
Why?
Well, coins in this huge numbers would interrupt the current demand for sure and hence the price will dip down.
Is it possible to trace who’s the owner of this wallet?
Many people also believe that the owner of the wallet might not be a guy with a good plan. What if the person behind this is upto something unusual? Now that this wallet address is has got a lot of eyeballs, it will be very helpful to narrow down the owner of the wallet.
If the owner tries to enchash BTC to fiat, there’s just one way of doing so, exchanges. Exchanges have KYC done, and this way, exchanges can point down the owner of the wallet. Considering the fact that the owner plays smart and exchanges in smaller amounts (like the user transferred to sub-wallets), the user would lose a siginificant portion of coins as fees.
Okay so you’d be wondering what goes into the mind before trading such a huge amount. Let’s take a loot at some of the top best practices that you should consider if you too are interested in investing into cryptocurrency.
5 best practices/tips for trading cryptocurrency
- Invest what you can afford to lose: Neither bragging nor lying, cryptocurrency is a source of making a bomb of money and at the same time, a source to lose all you have. It’s not a new thing to understand that investing in something which has price fluctuations is too risky. Talking of equities, the fluctuations is not more than 5–10 percent. On the other hand, the price change in the case of bitcoins is at least 30%. Imagine it like this, as soon as you save a word document in stead of save as, the changes made are saved forever. Similarly, as soon as you convert fiat to cryptocurrency, consider it gone forever. Unless you are sufficient enough to withdraw it before it’s too late. There is literally no guarantee of getting your money back. Today you invest and you may lose it the next day, even next hour. If you are ready to lose what you have invested, you are good to go. If not, step back and wait for the cryptocurrency market to saturate. As per the market trends, soon the market will be saturated and stagnant. Demand vs supply will more or less be the same. In that situation, the price fluctuations will be similar to equitiy. However, the price doesn’t depend on this. Depending on the time taken for the market to saturate, the price would vary.
- Pay close attention to Bitcoin: Bitcoin is the gold of the internet. Sure, it wasn’t invented to become a cryptocurrency, but it was a serendipity and we have to accept it. Bitcoin directly and indirectly, control the price of all other cryptocurrencies (there are 1900 plus cryptocurrencies). If you pay close attention to the market, whenever Bitcoin’s price rises, altcoin’s price rise. Same thing can happen otherwise too, it may or may not rise again, and you should be ready for that. The best time to invest or withdraw is when the price is either organically growing or saturated.
- Diversify, do not invest everything in one place: If you’ve been an active invester in shares, you’d know that investing everything in one place is not advisible. Similarly, investing everything in one cryptocurrency would both fruitful and risky, here’s how. When you buy cryptocurrencies and store it for a long time, it is called to be stored in a cold storage. Once the investment is in cold storage, it’s in an excited state where the can either shoot up or crash. Furthermore, there are chances that the exchange that you are storing your coins, might be attacked and just like the famous cryptocurrency hacks, you too lose the funds. On the other side of the see-saw, you might even gain more than 100% ROI. Statistically speaking, between Jan’16 and Jan’18 the price of Corgicoin and Verge grew 60,000x and 13,000x respectively. While, Bitcoin grew only by 34x. Sure, 34 times of Bitcoin is higher than 73000x of both, but you have higher ROI at lesser risk.
- Avoid being greedy: This is a slippery ecosystem. Once you enter it, you keep faling in it. It’s natural to get greedy, but you should know when to stop. Cryptoverse is not forever, not right now. We recommend to invest in one cryptocurrency for not more than 6 months. In this period, the price has enough time to recover if it crashes and enough time to rise from what it was already. Say a coin rises by 30%, sure pump profit from it. But if you are planning for it to rise by 40% or 50%, at least pull 70–80 percent of the profits back and let the remaining 20% at stake. If it rises, well and good, if not, you’ve already pulled more than what you’ve lost. Simple math.
- Investigate thoroughly: Investment banker and stock brokers are the classic example to mention here. They can sell anything that they lay their eyes on. These people get into cryptocurrency market and sell cryptocurrencies to less informed people and churn profits out of it. They either sell cryptocurrencies they bought or make them buy from exchanges they’re affliated to. Either ways, they win. To avoid being fooled, do your part of research. Thanks to the digital media, most of us know that cryptocurrency is a risky place to invest. Therefore, most of the people who invest already research properly and take further steps. If you are reading this for the first time, we recommend you to consider taking some more time and research properly.
Conclusion
That’s it for now. We hope these tips helped you in making a educated decision and save your hard earned money. These lessons are the most common things any investor should know. So, cryptocurrency trading is not limited to only this. You yourself should listen to your gut feeling, your reaserch, experts and community before putting in even a single dollar.
This post was a blend of the huge amount cryptocurrencies being traded to dilute it and some best practices for cryptocurrency trading.
Over to you. Did this post help you understand cryptocurrency trading? At least the best practices? What are your thoughts on the huge amount of BTC that is being transferred to sub wallets. Do you have any update that the community should know? Let us know in the comment section below. Also, feel free to share this post with those who are looking for this information and on in your social groups.
Originally published at http://www.bitfolio.org/cryptocurrency-trading-tips.
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