What are all the small transactions in Satoshi's address?

Question

I read that Satoshi never moved or spent his coins, so I expected to see his address stay unchanged since mined. But it looks like there are lots of small transactions: e.g. in the first address there are more than 1000 txs, and in the second address, there are about 65. What are those for? Who made them and why?

Answer 1

Of course, because Bitcoin is (mostly) anonymous, we can't know for sure who has been sending these, let alone their reasons. But some guesses:

• People donating money to Satoshi, since it's known to be his address.

• Mistakes. Satoshi's address is commonly used as an example in guides for creating transactions, etc, and it could be that some people copied the example and forgot to change the destination address.

• Attention. I saw some transactions with attached OP_RETURN messages, e.g. this one (see under "Output Scripts" near the bottom). By sending to a well-known address, there is a better chance that curious people like you will stumble upon the transaction and read the message.

• Just for lols.

• There are altcoins and other protocols that rely on "burning" bitcoins by sending them to a well-known address with no known private key. A variant on this would be to send the coins to Satoshi. Either he eventually spends them (so it becomes a donation) or he doesn't (so it's a burn), but either way the parties involved probably aren't getting the coins back. I haven't seen this variant in practice but it's conceivable that someone has tried it.