NEXT: Bad Bitcoin
It’s 2024 and there’s a new mystery emerging around Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
This time, a discussion of a new mystery began to appear on X, where everyone’s favorite ch-art Wicked Bitcoin posted the discovery.
Basically, adoption depends on:
- It is clear that Satoshi Nakamoto was the first Bitcoin miner – after all, he sent bitcoins to the first contributors, and since he did not set himself a nice “founder’s share”, they could only come from mining.
- That said, we don’t really know how many Satoshi bitcoins have been mined. (He’s never commented on it publicly, except for one reported instance when he said he “owns a lot” of bitcoins.) Most of that “common knowledge” comes from a single study done in 2013, and while it’s become something like lore, there’s a lot of debate about what it proves.
- In fact, research has suggested that Satoshi’s mining activity can be seen on the blockchain in what is called a “Patoshi pattern.” Long story short, the first, very big miner changed the way they embed data in the blockchain (with a rare iteration of ExtraNonce), and most believe that this could only have been done by Nakamoto (who knew a lot about the software at a young age).
- Jameson Lopp (Casa co-founder) is slated for this project in 2022. He added new analysis about this mysterious miner, including finding that they did not want to increase their profit. Some felt that this was another strong point of the data Patoshi was Satoshi.
- Now, Wicked adds a mystery, which refers to the previous analysis of “Patoshi”. In fact, by plotting this miner’s blocks on the date-time axis, you find that there is a noticeable gap in the timestamps of this miner’s blocks in early 2009.
Of course, as to what we can conclude from this data, as Wicked’s comments section points out, that’s up for debate.
Adding to the issue is the lack of historical information about Bitcoin since 2009. What has come to light are several public email lists and private letters published over the years (some have been forced into court).
From May-June 2009, there were no Bitcoin forums, and there may have been only a few people hosting the network. Martii Malmi, (Satoshi’s first real engineer on the right) would have just started his career.
This means that we don’t really have a concrete timeline or what happened and why other than what is visible by looking at the data, and there, there is little to discuss – there were many days in 2009 when any Bitcoin transactions.
Wicked’s guess here is that the above posts show situations where the “Patoshi miner” was not connected to the Internet, and had to restart. At this point, the miner was so powerful that they simply overwrite the blocks found by other miners in their absence.
Detractors draw several conclusions from this, even suggesting that Satoshi may have been testing how well the network handled the “51% attack”. This can be heard – after all, the idea that Bitcoin was strong enough to work as long as the majority of participants were honest was his biggest contribution to the digital currency. as a concept.
(Actually, you could argue (as I did) that’s all Satoshi brought to the fledgling Bitcoin, his core skill taking strong computer science concepts and putting them together.)
That said, there is quite a bit to learn here. A 51% random attack would still have made the mining more reliable, and this would be fodder for critics who like to paint Satoshi as the type of error tester we see on other chains today.
Still, there’s a lot of speculation here, and without more analysis (or more corroborating evidence) it’s hard to make a firm conclusion.
In any case, we can be surprised by the mystery that almost 16 years later, Satoshi has been very successful in hiding his tracks from history.