What the OP is describing is basically just a pump-and-dump scheme. Which is particularly common in the crypto world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump

Not common with Bitcoin itself-- even if someone comes up with something that actually will move the price, it's hard for them to be the ones that profit from it.

The P&Ds are common with thinly traded premined coins.

The altcoins have done a fair job of sweeping people with zero scruples away from Bitcoin. I'd be quite surprised if this were someone trying to drive up the price of Bitcoin.

I've not been following Bitcoin news for a few years now but I seem to recall there were lots of reports about BTC "whales" making up a significant proportion of the overall wealth on BTC. And how they used their position to manipulate the market to some extent. A quick Google seems to back my assumptions too, eg https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/052014/why-b...

Now I'm not saying that the OPs theory about this being a pump and dump is likely correct. But I don't think it is any more speculative than the other ideas offered here (jilted ex / copy&paste error / testing code that mistakenly shipped / etc)

Inevitably when you see people talking about "whales" they end up linking to exchange wallets (which naturally experience activity that both leads and lags trade).

And they're also talking about parties controlling 1000 BTC levels... which, while an astounding amount of money, are still small compared to the markets.

I can't say it's impossible, but I'd rate most of the other speculation above it.

Then again, nothing stops someone from trying something that won't work...

MtGox, Tether?

If the receiving wallet is truly dead, the "dump" part of the scheme is impossible, which makes the scheme non-profitable.

The OPs point was this the "pump" part (ie get people talking about Bitcoin again). If their theory is true (and I'm not saying I believe it is), then the dump part wouldn't be transferring to another wallet, it would be selling their remaining Bitcoin.

If this is a pump and dump scheme (and that's a big "if") then they would need an order of magnitude more than 27BTC (ie the amount they sent to this wallet) for this to work.

Potentially even better than selling their remaining bitcoins is buying options right before doing this pump.

Well, I'm speculating that the $1M is just a (massively expensive) gambit to get the public interested in bitcoin again and lead to a "pump". The "dump" would then involve the even larger amounts that the person in question would have to be holding (for this scheme to even remotely make sense).

Profit is the motivation of human endeavor…. Maybe we aren’t alone, it is as it will.

Now my wife’s musings about crypto dog yesterday are far more meaningful.

Let's say you sit on ~2716.9 BTC. You have a scheme that'll cost you 26.9 BTC to shift the price. You "only" need the scheme to successfully increase the price of your remaining 2690 BTC by 1% to have recouped your cost. Any movement higher than that and you'll profit.

I'm not saying it's a good idea, but it's not unusual for pump-and-dump schemes to involve burning a lot of value to trigger the pump they're trying to profit off of. You need to treat the bit they're planning on dumping as separate from whatever capital they're prepared to invest to make the pump happen.

So what's your theory?

Had the incorrect wallet in their device's memory, pasted and hit send without triple checking. Rookie error.

I think even the richest people on earth will take the time to double-check a million-dollar transaction.

For someone to have done this accidentally and not bothered to double-check, it seems to me they would need to have fat-fingered both the address and the amount. This person is typing with hams.

For people with say 10 billion dollars, losing a million is losing 1 / 10 000 of their wealth. It’s as if you have 10 000 dollars in savings and lose 1 dollar in the couch cushions.

Plus that wealth is generating more wealth. Logically, a multi-billionaire wouldn’t care.

That's nonsense, not only the "it's like 10/15$ for me and you" argument quite weak, because ordinary people tend to pay attention to the addresses they send money to (regardless of amount), but people don't get rich nor stay rich by not caring about their spending either.

This guy swapped over $600k and didn't check the slippage and lost over $200k on it

https://forum.osmosis.zone/t/refund-dydx-user-funds-lost-fro...

Doubtful. Almost any other wallet seems possible, but Satoshi's wallet isn't one that you would randomly have copied moments before making a million dollar transaction.

> Rookie error.

You're obviously working under the assumption that the sender is someone for whom one more or one less MUSD makes any kind of difference to his everyday life.

bitcoin wallets would not be different by just a single character.

With binance, you have to double check the withdraw address, especially for something large like this. I'm surprised their own processes didn't flag it.

It was not directly from Binance. It went into an intermediate wallet first.