El Salvador’s Bitcoin Wallet: Featuring Sats, Felines, and a Cypherpunk Manifesto

El Salvador’s Bitcoin Wallet: Featuring Sats, Felines, and a Cypherpunk Manifesto

Bitcoin News
March 15, 2024 by Diana Ambolis
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Around $700 worth of satoshis were contributed to El Salvador’s newly established “Bitcoin piggy bank” through numerous donations. Shortly after El Salvador unveiled its plan to safeguard a significant portion of its Bitcoin (BTC) holdings in a physically secured cold wallet, Bitcoin enthusiasts wasted no time in filling the wallet with their preferred “rare sats”
bitcoins

Around $700 worth of satoshis were contributed to El Salvador’s newly established “Bitcoin piggy bank” through numerous donations.

Shortly after El Salvador unveiled its plan to safeguard a significant portion of its Bitcoin (BTC) holdings in a physically secured cold wallet, Bitcoin enthusiasts wasted no time in filling the wallet with their preferred “rare sats” and Ordinals.

On March 14, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador introduced the concept of a “Bitcoin piggy bank,” indicating that a portion of the nation’s Bitcoin assets would be stored in a cold wallet housed within a physical vault. According to Bitcoin explorer Mempool, the wallet currently holds a balance of $388 million in Bitcoin.

However, a closer examination by Ordiscan reveals that the wallet has also received at least 67 Ordinals donations, including BRC-20 tokens, textual inscriptions, images, a 3D “runestone,” and even a copy of the “Cypherpunk Manifesto” authored by Eric Hughes in March 1993. Additionally, the wallet has amassed approximately $700 in satoshi donations, with some labeled as “pizza” and “vintage” sats. For instance, “pizza sats” refer to the 10,000 BTC famously used by early Bitcoin contributor Laszlo Hanyecz to purchase two Papa John’s pepperoni pizzas on May 22, 2010, while “vintage sats” denote sats mined within the first 1000 Bitcoin blocks.

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In total, 56 transactions have been directed to El Salvador’s new wallet address, with the majority of them involving small-value transfers.

“Gotta love bitcoiners. Donations rolling into El Salvador’s cold wallet,” remarked Gerson Martínez, a strategist at El Salvadoran Bitcoin mining project Volcano Energy, in a March 15 post. The account of HODL15Capital also commended Bukele and El Salvador for their transparent approach.

The 5,689 Bitcoin balance in the wallet far surpasses the previously known holdings of 2,864 BTC, valued at $195 million, held in the government’s treasury, as reported by Nayib Bukele Portfolio Tracker.

However, Bukele clarified that this figure does not account for Bitcoin acquired by the government through its passport program, mining projects, or conversions of BTC to United States dollars for local businesses, among other sources.

The 5,689 BTC balance in the wallet resulted from multiple transactions. The initial transfer of 1,120 BTC, valued at $76.5 million, occurred on March 13 through a 3/5 multi-signature authorization, approved by four signatories, according to Mempool. The largest transfer of 4,000 BTC, worth $273 million, took place at 9:38 pm UTC on March 14—approximately two hours after Bukele’s announcement.

Bukele, who was reelected as president on Feb. 4 with over 80% of the votes, has been at the forefront of El Salvador’s Bitcoin initiative since September 2021, when the country became the first to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender.