WHO DO WE FOLLOW: Bad Bitcoin
It’s 2024 and a new mystery is emerging surrounding Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.
In this case, the discussion about a new enigma first surfaced on X, which features everyone’s favorite cartoonist Bad Bitcoin posted the discovery.
In essence, the finding boils down to the following:
- It is clear that Satoshi Nakamoto was an early Bitcoin miner. After all, he sent bitcoins to early contributors, and since he hadn’t provided himself with a fancy “founder allocation,” they could only have come from mining.
- That said, we don’t really know how many bitcoins Satoshi has mined. (He has never publicly commented on it, apart from one reported instance in which he claimed to own “a lot” of bitcoins.) Most of what is “common knowledge” comes from one study done in 2013and although it has become something like tradition, there is much disagreement as to what it proves.
- Essentially, the study suggested that Satoshi mining activity was visible on the blockchain through what is called the ‘Patoshi pattern’. Long story short, an early, very large miner changed the way they embedded data on the blockchain (via a non-standard iteration of the ExtraNonce), and most believe this could only have been done by Nakamoto done (who knew the most about the blockchain). software in its infancy).
- Jameson breed (co-founder of Casa) built on this work in 2022. He added new analysis on this mysterious miner, including the finding that they were not trying to maximize their profitability. Some felt this was another strong data point. Patoshi was Satoshi.
- Now Wicked adds to the mystery, a mystery that hints at previous ‘Patoshi’ analyses. By plotting this miner’s blocks on a date-time axis, he discovers that there is a notable gap in the timestamps of this miner’s blocks in early 2009.
What we can conclude from this data, as evidenced by Wicked’s comments section, is of course up for debate.
Compounding the issue is that there is a lack of historical information on Bitcoin dating back to 2009. What has come to light comes down to a few public email lists and private correspondences published over the years (some forced by court hearings).
As early as May-June 2009, there were no Bitcoin forums, and it is possible that only a dozen people were mining the network. Martii Malmi, (Satoshi’s first real right-wing developer) is said to have only just begun his work.
This means we don’t really have a concrete timeline of what happened and why, beyond what is visible by looking at the data, and there isn’t even that much to discuss – there were many days in 2009 where that wasn’t the was the case. any Bitcoin transactions.
Wicked’s dissertation here is that the above gaps show cases where the “Patoshi miner” went offline and then had to restart operations. At this point the miner was so powerful that they simply overwrote all the blocks that other miners had found in their absence.
Wicked draws some conclusions from this, even going so far as to suggest that Satoshi may have tested how well the network withstood “51% attacks.” This would be plausible – after all, the idea that Bitcoin was robust enough to function as long as a majority of participants were honest was its main contribution to digital cash as a concept.
(Really, you could argue (as I have) that this is the only thing Satoshi brought to Bitcoin that was new; his main skill was taking hardened computer science concepts and stitching them together.)
That said, there is some bearish reading here. A casual strike of 51% would still have put fair mining into question, and this could be fodder for critics eager to portray Satoshi as the kind of errant experimenter we see in other chains today.
Still, there are a lot of conjectures here, and without further analysis (or more supporting evidence) it’s difficult to draw a definitive conclusion.
In any case, we can marvel at the mystery that Satoshi has managed so well to hide his traces from history almost sixteen years later.