Patoshi Pattern

On Wednesday, 50 bitcoin mined on February 9, 2009, was moved from the original address to a new address. The movement of coins caused a great commotion throughout the cryptocurrency community, as some individuals assumed it may have been the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto. However, skeptics believe that even though the coins stemmed from an address a touch over a month old from the time Nakamoto bootstrapped the Bitcoin network, it may have been someone else who mined alongside the creator.

The Incredible Fascination With Bitcoin Block 3,654

The creator of Bitcoin and early cryptocurrency mining, has been a topical conversation on Wednesday. The reason is because 50 BTC from February 9, 2009, was moved from the original block reward address to another address. This has made people break out their notes, analyze the blockchain, and become armchair sleuths hot on the trail for whoever the person might be. Various theories have come into play, as people have thought that maybe it was Hal Finney’s wife, one of the Kleimans, Craig Wright, Marti Malmi, someone who may have mined alongside Satoshi Nakamoto, or possibly even the creator.

One of the first issues at hand is how many people were mining bitcoin in 2009. Some people believe a few others had access to Satoshi’s software around that time. There are instances where Satoshi told the public that the software was given to others for peer review. A mailing list response to James A. Donald on Nov. 17, 2008, explains that Satoshi gave files to possibly a few people before the launch on January 3, 2009. A bitcointalk.org member dubbed “Cryddit” told the public he had access to early software. Prior to block 3,654, Satoshi Nakomoto also said he distributed the software to a few other people and thanked two people named “Dustin” and “Nicholas” for their feedback.

Sergio Demián Lerner’s Patoshi Pattern

Coin Metric’s executive, Nic Carter, also discussed the 50 BTC coins from 2009 moving on Wednesday. “Early non-Satoshi mined coins are periodically awakened, just not frequently,” Carter said. “Keep in mind it’s basically impossible to prove that Satoshi ‘didn’t’ mine these coins, but the best research we have suggests that Satoshi mined a specific set of blocks, of which this is not one.” At this point, Carter is discussing the research done by RSK Labs chief scientist Sergio Demián Lerner. “Here’s a visualization of the Patoshi pattern with the block that was just spent. The blocks believed to be Satoshi have a specific pattern in the nonce, which this block does not have,” Carter stressed on Twitter. Other bitcoin advocates came up with the same hypothesis using Sergio Demián Lerner’s “Patoshi” pattern research.

Wild Satoshi Theories: The Curious Case of Bitcoin Block 3654 from 2009 — Chart: Nic Carter, via Twitter

That particular research shows that there is strong evidence to suggest that a single miner or very small group of miners (5 CPUs) could have mined 22,000 blocks. One person asked software developer Jameson Lopp if he “thought the ‘Patoshi Pattern’ is an exhaustive list?”

“IIRC the pattern drops off after block 50,000 or so,” Lopp replied. “That’s all it is, though – a pattern. The list is exhaustive in that it’s what matches the pattern; the real Satoshi might have mined other blocks with another setup,” the developer added. The RSK Labs chief scientist wasn’t the only one who studied early patterns in Bitcoin history as another person in 2017 tried to unravel the clues.

A Single Intel CPU: 1 Miner, 5 Miners, Or 20?

Evidence suggests that back in the early days of bitcoin, around the same time block 3,654 was produced, there was only a small amount of hashpower pushing the chain forward. A blog post from eklitzke.org shows that between the birth of the Bitcoin network in January 2009 and the two months that followed, the hashrate was around 4-8 megahash per second (MH/s). We all know that an old Antminer S9 could blow that hashrate away, but back then Satoshi used a central processing unit.

“I find it reasonable to assume that most of the hashing power in the first year or so of Bitcoin’s existence came from Satoshi Nakamoto,” the blog post details. “If real users were actually joining and leaving Bitcoin, one would expect the hash rate to have varied a lot more, particularly in the first six months.”

The report also shows that the hashrate could have been kept up with a single computer. “The few months have a consistent hash rate of about 5 MH/s [and] would it have been feasible for Satoshi Nakamoto to have solo mined with 5 MH/s in 2009?” the researcher asked. The report’s author continued by adding:

The answer is yes, and in fact, it’s possible to achieve this hash rate using a single Intel CPU. The linked Bitcoin wiki page gives a 5.1 MH/s hash rate for the Core i5-650 CPU, which was released in January 2010 with a 3.2 GHz clock speed. The Intel CPUs available in 2008 when Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin would have been slightly earlier generation Core 2 processors. Those would have been nearly as fast as a Core i5-650. In fact, the highest-end desktop processors available when Satoshi Nakamoto started mining Bitcoin would have been much faster than that. The wiki page shows that a Core 2 Quad Q6600 (released January 2007) would have been capable of achieving 11 MH/s. The numbers for AMD CPUs in this era are similar.

Malmi Denies Involvement and Links to the Kleiman v. Wright Case

The early Bitcoin developer, Marti Malmi, has explained on Twitter that it probably wasn’t him either, when he was recently mentioned in a Cointelegraph article. “Nope,” Malmi tweeted. “Bitcoin was announced on the cryptography mailing list in January 2009 and many people could have tested it. I found Bitcoin around April.”

Then there was also the Twitter conversation involving Craig Wright, the Australian native who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto. “I followed some of the output of that transaction from the old wallet,” explained one sleuth on Twitter. “It led to this wallet, 966 pages back 100 BTC was transferred last fall (it has 4800 transactions in it). Not sure if you can tell anything from this or where that 100 came from.” Craig Wright’s friend Calvin Ayre responded by saying:

I think you will find this to not be Craigs, or at least not Craig doing it…who owns this is for the courts maybe.

“It traces back to block 9. This is definitely Craig’s address as he signed from it in 2015 and in 2017 on the @satoshi handle,” another person replied to the conversation with Ayre. Some speculate that one of the addresses used in the Kleiman v. Wright court case is somehow involved with the 50 BTC movement on Wednesday.

Twitter is now going crazy about the speculation that the coins may have been the very creator’s bitcoins. However, many people are already dismissing the movement by simply referring to onchain blockchain analysis and data. Despite the debunkings, cryptocurrency enthusiasts have always been fascinated with Satoshi Nakamoto’s lore and alleged treasures.

What do you think about the 50 bitcoin from 2009 moving? Let us know in the comments below.

The post Wild Satoshi Theories: The Curious Case of Bitcoin Block 3654 from 2009 appeared first on Bitcoin News.

Strong Evidence Shows a Single Miner Mined More Than a Million Bitcoin

On April 16, RSK Labs chief scientist Sergio Demián Lerner published a new research study concerning the earliest blocks mined on the Bitcoin network. The report concerning one of Bitcoin’s earliest miners provides strong evidence to suggest that a single miner processed 22,000 blocks. Additionally, Lerner has released a new website called Satoshi Blocks that aims to help crypto enthusiasts visualize mining during the protocol’s earliest days.

Also read: Are You Ready for What Happens If Satoshi’s Coins Move?

New Data Stemming from Bitcoin’s Earliest Miners Hardens Prior Evidence

Years ago, independent researcher and cryptographer Sergio Demián Lerner released one of the most in-depth studies concerning Bitcoin’s earliest mining periods. According to his first study published on April 17, 2013, the vast majority of the initial BTC mined was done by a single miner. Moreover, Lerner produced data sets from his blockchain analysis that tracked the extranonce fields within the coinbase field stemming from the coinbase transactions themselves. At the time Lerner estimated that the miner was able to gather precisely 1,814,400 BTC. In addition to this large number of mined coins, 63% of those coins, or 1.1 million, have never been spent since the day they were created.

Fast forward to six years later and Lerner has published another rigorous study that provides an even stronger argument that backs his prior claims. The latest paper, called “The Return of the Deniers and the Revenge of Patoshi,” at first discusses Lerner’s original study and how he originally came to his previous conclusion. Lerner detailed how he found the information in the extranonce field and how certain flaws revealed information in a “non-privacy preserving way.”

Strong Evidence Suggests a Single Entity Mined More Than 1 Million Bitcoin — Lerner calls these patterns shown as blue lines the ‘Patoshi pattern’ after identifying a single miner who accumulated about 1.1M bitcoins during 2009-2010. The Patoshi pattern (blue) and other miner patterns (green). The data can be **visualized on Lerner’s new website Satoshiblocks.info.**

Lerner’s paper then discusses the single miner who has been dubbed ‘Patoshi’ and describes how he was able to find the miner’s pattern. Lerner explains how a few people have accepted the existence of the Patoshi pattern, a few years on, yet believe multiple miners may have been synchronized or there was some form of an early mining pool in place since the genesis block. Lerner debunks these arguments with many reasons and by explaining various factors including:

99.9% of all Patoshi blocks are unspent.
Each Patoshi block “links” to a block in the pattern set, but not to any of the remaining blocks.
There are some time intervals where the Patoshi pattern interrupts abruptly.
Mining pools were invented several years later.
Mining pools were created to reduce reward variance due to the low individual probability of solving a block, but during 2009 single miners could easily solve blocks frequently.

By the end of 2013, Lerner said he had found proof “beyond any doubt, that the pattern was real, using a completely different method.” His latest study describes how he discovered that all of the blocks mined by Patoshi were identifiable by a depleted range of nonces used in processed blocks to a specific range. From 2014 to early 2019, Lerner didn’t have much more to add to his prior research and there were a few other studies published recently that suggest Patoshi only mined around 700,000 coins. However, Lerner’s latest study “proves with overwhelming probability” that a single miner extracted all of the coins in his Patoshi pattern, which is well over a million BTC. The researcher’s new argument is based on computer clocks because even in the early days miners used a local computer’s clock to timestamp blocks after processing them.

“If you’ve studied the Bitcoin protocol, you’ll know that block timestamps are not necessarily monotonically increasing,” Lerner writes. “This is true from the Bitcoin source code 0.1.0 to the latest version of Bitcoin Core that had an internal miner (before mining pools were created).”

Clocks and Timestamps

Some of the latest evidence Lerner provides also concerns why he strongly believes the single miner extracted close to 1.1M coins, which is even more than the initial 1M BTC discovered by Lerner years ago. For instance, Lerner states that “computer clocks can be unsynchronized from each other,” “timestamps were not updated continuously during mining,” and “block timestamps are adjusted by the Bitcoin software to match the median time of the peers that are connected to a node.” Because of these reasons, the study notes that the same computer will almost never reverse its own timestamps and “the delta between inverted block timestamps indirectly measures the hashrate of the parent block miner.”

“There are no time inversions between Patoshi blocks — Zero — This result is very relevant considering the Patoshi blocks account for 43% of all the blocks in the first 50k. I’m open to considering other explanations, but for me, this can only mean one thing — There is a single PC clock whose time is stamped in the Patoshi blocks.” Lerner’s paper continues:

A single software that controls how block templates are created — A single miner.

The RSK Labs chief scientist concludes that there is evidence that links the Patoshi patterns to Satoshi but he prefers to stop there and “leave Patoshi alone once for all.” Lerner believes the evidence he provided is reliable but he expects more people to deny the information in forums. Lerner also infers that he has discovered a more precise figure and coded a more accurate pattern-following algorithm which can be viewed on his new site satoshiblocks.info.

Do you think the Patoshi pattern belongs to Satoshi? Do you believe a single miner mined over 1.1 million BTC during the network’s earliest days? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Image credits: Shutterstock, Sergio Demián Lerner’s blog Bitslog.com, Pixabay, and Satoshiblocks.info.

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The post Strong Evidence Suggests a Single Entity Mined More Than 1 Million Bitcoin appeared first on Bitcoin News.