Who owns the single largest Bitcoin wallet on the internet?In September, the FBI shut down the Silk Road online drug marketplace, and it started seizing bitcoins belonging to the Dread Pirate Roberts — the operator of the illicit online marketplace, who they say is an American man named Ross Ulbricht.The seizure sparked an ongoing public discussion about the future of Bitcoin, the world’s most popular digital currency, but it had an unforeseen side-effect: It made the FBI the holder of the world’s biggest Bitcoin wallet.The FBI now controls more than 144,000 bitcoins that reside at a bitcoin address that consolidates much of the seized Silk Road bitcoins.Those 144,000 bitcoins are worth close to $100 million at Tuesday’s exchange rates.Another address, containing Silk Road funds seized earlier by the FBI, contains nearly 30,000 bitcoins ($20 million).That doesn’t make the FBI the world’s largest bitcoin holder.This honor is thought to belong to bitcoin’s shadowy inventor Satoshi Nakamoto, who is estimated to have mined 1 million bitcoins in the currency’s early days.

His stash is spread across many wallets.But it does put the federal agency ahead of the Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who in July said that they’d cornered about 1 percent of all bitcoins (there are 12 million bitcoins in circulation).In the fun house world of bitcoin tracking, it’s hard to say anything for certain.But it is safe to say that there are new players in the Bitcoin world — although not as many people are buying bitcoins as one might guess from all of the media attention.Satoshi stores his wealth in a large number of bitcoin addresses, most of them holding just 50 bitcoins.It’s a bit of a logistical nightmare, but most savvy Bitcoin investors spread out their bitcoins across multiple wallets.That way if they lose the key to one of them or get hacked, all is not lost.“It’s easier to keep track of one address, but it’s also most risky that way,” says Andrew Rennhack, the operator of the Bitcoin Rich List, a website that tracks the top addresses in the world of bitcoin.

According to Rennhack, the size of the bitcoin universe has expanded over the past year, but the total number of people on the planet who hold at least one bitcoin is actually pretty small — less than a quarter-million people.litecoin buy or sellToday, there are 246,377 bitcoin addresses with at least one bitcoin in them, he says.litecoin rate bitcoinAnd many people keep their bitcoins in more than one address.litecoin buy or sellA year ago, that number was 159,916, he says.true poker bitcoinAlthough some assume that the largest Bitcoin addresses are held by bitcoin dinosaurs — miners who got into the game early on, when it was easy to rack up thousands of bitcoins with a single general-purpose computer — almost all of the top 10 bitcoin addresses do not fit that profile, says Sarah Meiklejohn, a University of California, San Diego, graduate student.doge to bitcoin

She took a look at how many transactions in these wallets seemed to match the profile of early-day miners and found that only one of them really fit the bill.bitcoin store in torontoThe rest seem to belong to what Meiklejohn calls Bitcoin’s “nouveau riche”: People who are accumulating bitcoins from non-mining sources.ethereum not showing up in wallet“What you’re seeing is this influx of a different kind of wealth,” she says.bitcoin inventor killedBecause most bitcoin addresses haven’t been publicly identified — like the FBI’s — it’s hard to say exactly makes up the new Bitcoin top 10.bitcoin ufcMeiklejohn says that they’re likely to include wallets created by up-and-coming Bitcoin exchanges or businesses.

One of them is the wallet that’s thought to contain 96,000 bitcoins stolen from the Silk-Road successor, Sheep Marketplace.UPDATE 25th November, 12:16 GMT: We contacted Bitstamp CEO Nejc Kodrič to ask whether there was any truth in the rumour that the transaction was made by his company, but he declined to comment.Bitcoin internet hangouts were buzzing today after noticing someone had shifted 194,993 BTC (over $147m on CoinDesk's BPI) in one transaction.The transaction, tagged "Shit Load of Money!"by its mystery originator*, appeared on Blockchain.info early in the evening of 22nd November.It is one of the largest transactions in bitcoin's history, by far the largest under bitcoin's recent high prices, and represents 1.6% of all bitcoins now in circulation.(*Correction: as pointed out in the comments below, the tag was attached to the receiving address and not by the originator.)Bitcoin's distributed nature ensures all transactions are visible on the public record, though users are identified only by 30+ character addresses (and any tags they choose to add).

If the address is not already known and the user does not identify themselves in an obvious way, they remain anonymous without analysis or detective work.Unsurprisingly, a transaction of that size has prompted the bitcoin community to do some analysis and detective work.The transaction involved a large number of sending addresses, with some of them from blocks mined in February 2010 or even earlier, prompting excited speculation they might be from Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin's absent (and likely pseudonymous) founder.Or was it Richard Branson, who caused his own digital currency frenzy today by announcing his company Virgin Galactic would accept payment in bitcoin?Satoshi Nakamoto is unlikely to reveal him/herself in such an ostentatious manner, and early coins may have changed hands several times.More possibly the lucky owner is a miner from bitcoin's early days, or a business moving the amount to a more secure form of physical storage.The Washington Post's detective work, done by a researcher into how much block chain information may reveal about users, speculated the transaction might be exchange Bitstamp moving its own funds between addresses.

While 194,993 BTC was moved, it's important to note it has not been exchanged for any fiat currency... that we know of.'Dumping' such a large amount at once would probably have a negative impact on bitcoin's value.On the bitcointalk forums, some users were less interested in the owners' identity and more impressed by the infrastructure that allowed such an amount to be transferred without any regulatory hindrance, lawyers, or fees (the user paid no transaction fee at all).Even handing over that amount in hard cash would be a logistical challenge."Beautiful, so effortless to move so much money... I'm sometimes involved with very large cross-border transactions and the logistics of making payments of this size are, more often that not, a complete PITA, with timezones and banking hours getting in the way," wrote user runam0k.The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is an independent media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies.