New blockchain analysis has sharpened the Bitcoin OG burn mystery surrounding 107 BTC, worth $8.3 million at the time of destruction according to Bitbo, that five dormant wallets sent to the unspendable address 1111111111111111111114oLvT2 in May, all arriving in the same block.
The five wallets show ‘strong indicators of common ownership,’ according to Chainalysis, and were all funded on the same day in April 2014. On dormancy: Yahoo Finance, citing Lookonchain, puts the inactive period at 11 years; the snippet from Bitcoin educator Bennet characterises it as almost 12 years. The wallets were funded in April 2014, and the difference comes down to how the clock is measured.
The Five Wallets and the $10,400 Pattern
Chainalysis traces most of the funds back to Mt. Gox. Reuters reported that the Tokyo District Court ordered Mt. Gox liquidated on 24 April 2014, with Nobuaki Kobayashi appointed trustee, meaning the five wallets were funded in the same month the exchange formally entered liquidation. At that point, one bitcoin was worth $483 under the Japanese bankruptcy valuation.
That timing does not require the coins to have been withdrawn from Mt. Gox directly. As Bennet notes: ‘It’s entirely possible that the owner of these coins was one of the lucky ones who managed to get their coins off the exchange before it collapsed.’
One of the five addresses sent 19.6 BTC across 60 transactions to the same unidentified custodian between 2022 and 2024. The BTC amounts ranged from roughly 0.15 BTC to 0.62 BTC, but the dollar denominations are where the pattern emerges: 58 of those 60 transfers were within 10% of approximately $10,400 when sent, despite Bitcoin’s price more than quadrupling across that window. Bennet’s read: ‘This suggests to me a planned liquidation strategy.’ The frequency was not fixed, though. As Bennet puts it: ‘payment size was constant… frequency was not, these $10k transfers came in clusters,’ which points more towards discretionary withdrawal than automation.
The wallets also appear to have operated in rotation: one address sent to the custodian until its activity stopped, then another picked up with transactions of ‘similar cadence and value,’ per Chainalysis. The custodian itself is identified only as a large centralised exchange; Chainalysis says it does not publicly disclose the names of services it identifies.
The Bitcoin OG Burn Mystery: the $1 Million Round Trip
The transaction that resists any clean explanation is the March round trip. After sitting untouched for roughly 12 years, one wallet moved its entire balance of 20.00010537 BTC to the custodian and received 20.00006037 BTC back, a difference of 4,500 satoshis, or around $3. The returned amount came back in three transactions of 7 BTC, 7 BTC, and 6.00006037 BTC across three consecutive days, which Bennet reads as consistent with a daily withdrawal limit at the custodian.
The coins returned to the same address that had sent them, and spending the Bitcoin in March required the same private key used to burn it in May. That sequence rules out a simple exchange transaction and rules out a key change in between.
Chainalysis concedes: ‘We don’t have a clear explanation for why the owner would move a long-dormant stash through a custodian, retrieve roughly the same amount, and then deliberately burn it.’
The theories circulating are plausible but incomplete. A planned liquidation fits the earlier $10,400 cadence but does not explain why nearly $1 million went in and came straight back out. A custody test, proving an old key and custodian setup still worked after 12 years of dormancy, fits the round trip but not the subsequent destruction. Yahoo Finance notes that under U.S. tax rules and similar frameworks in several jurisdictions, sending crypto to a verifiable burn address may qualify as a taxable disposal with zero proceeds, making deliberate tax-loss realisation another theory in circulation, though there is no on-chain evidence linking the burn to a specific filing or regulatory trigger.
Privacy is also in the mix: sweeping coins through a custodian’s omnibus wallet severs the public chain of custody. But that still does not explain the destruction.
Bennet raises one more possibility: ‘There’s also the possibility that a very wealthy individual without heirs decided to permanently burn their coins (thereby publicly reducing the total bitcoin supply), rather than just destroying their keys.’
Burning is irreversible. Whatever the motive, the owner of those keys chose permanent removal over simple abandonment. If any of the five wallets ever moves again, there are no more coins left to move.
