Who we follow: Evil Bitcoin
It’s 2024 and there’s a new mystery surfacing around Bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
In this case, the post Discussion of a New Puzzle appeared first on X, where he was everyone’s favorite artist Evil Bitcoin Publication of the discovery.
Basically, the result boils down to this:
- Satoshi Nakamoto was clearly one of the first Bitcoin miners – he sent Bitcoins to early contributors, and since he didn’t set himself up for a nice “founder allotment”, those coins could only have come from mining.
- However, we don’t really know how many Bitcoins Satoshi mined. (He has never commented on it publicly, except for one reported instance where he claimed to “own a lot” of bitcoin.) Most “general knowledge” is from a single study. It was completed in 2013Although it has become something of a tradition, there is a lot of disagreement about what it proves.
- Essentially, the study noted that Satoshi’s mining activity was visible on the blockchain via a so-called “Patoshi pattern.” In short, a very large early miner changed the way they included data in the blockchain (through a non-standard iteration of ExtraNonce), and most believe this could only have been done by Nakamoto (who knew more about software in its infancy).
- Jameson Race (Co-Founder of Casa) built on this work in 2022. He added new analysis about this mysterious miner, including the finding that they were not seeking to maximize their profitability. Some felt that this was another strong data point that Patoshi was Satoshi.
- Now, a villain is adding to the mystery, which alludes to Patucci’s previous analyses. Essentially, by plotting this miner’s blocks on the date-time axis, he found that there was 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 shows, is up for debate.
Adding to the problem is that there has been a dearth of historical information about Bitcoin since 2009. What has been revealed amounts to a handful of public email lists and private correspondence that have been published over the years (some of which has been forced by court hearings).
From May to June 2009, there were no Bitcoin forums, and there could only be ten people mining the network. Martti Malmi (Satoshi’s first real developer) was just starting out.
This means that we don’t really have a specific timeline or what happened and why, beyond what can be seen by looking at the data, and there’s not much to discuss – there were many days in 2009 when there were no Bitcoin transactions.
Wicked thesis Here the above-mentioned gaps show cases where Patoshi Miner stopped connecting to the Internet and then had to restart operations. At this point, the miner was so powerful that he simply replaced any blocks found by other miners in their absence.
Wicked draws some conclusions from this, going so far as to suggest that Satoshi may have been testing how well the network could withstand “51% of attacks.” This may be plausible – after all, the idea that Bitcoin was powerful enough to work as long as the majority of participants were honest was his main contribution to digital cash as a concept.
(Really, you could say (as I did) that this was the only thing Satoshi brought to Bitcoin that was new, his basic skill at taking hardcore computer science concepts and stringing them together.)
However, there is a bit of a bearish reading here. An accidental 51% attack would have made fair mining moot, and this may have served as fodder for critics who like to paint Satoshi as the kind of wayward experimenter we see in other chains today.
However, there is a lot of speculation here, and without further analysis (or more corroborating evidence) it is difficult to reach a firm conclusion.
However, we can marvel at the mystery surrounding it, nearly 16 years later, as Satoshi has succeeded so well in hiding his traces from history.