Cryptographer Unravels Data Suggesting An Early Bitcoin Miner Accruing Over 1 Million BTC Coins

Cryptographer Unravels Data That May Link Early Bitcoin Mining To A Single Entity

Mining has always been a crucial part of the cryptocurrency world, particularly for Bitcoin. Several years ago, a researcher and cryptographer named Sergio Demián Lerner published a study with in-depth data regarding the mining periods during the early years of Bitcoin. The first study came out on April 17, 2013, which showed that the majority of the BTC mined came from a single miner.

The data was collected from the entrance field within the Coinbase field, directly from the actual Coinbase transactions. Based on the research at the time, it appears that the miner managed to collect 1,814,400 BTC. Since the creation of the coins, 1.1 million (63%) has never been spent.

Moving forward to this year, Lerner chose to publish another study that further validated and expanded upon the already exhaustive report from 2013. The new article supports the claims that he had last time, though it is titled, “The Return of the Deniers and the Revenge of Patoshi.”

The article turns attention to the former study that Lerner created, and describes how he ultimately came down to the former conclusion. He elaborates on the information he located through the entrance field and the way that there were flaws he discovered that exposed information in a “non-privacy preserving way.”

The new article then begins to discuss the miner that he calls Patoshi, and he expands on the pattern of his work. He said that there is been individuals who have accepted that Patoshi exists since the article, though the majority of people believe that there were synchronized miners working together or at least a mining pool established early on that can explain the performance.

It does not take much for Lerner to completely obliterate these other theories with multiple reasons that they cannot be true. His evidence states:

• Of the Patoshi blocks mined, 99.9% are still unspent.
• The blocks mined by Patoshi link up with another block in their pattern set.
• There are abrupt interruptions in several time periods.
• Mining pools did not come to fruition until years later, created to reduce the variance in rewards and in response to the difficulty of solving a block.

Lerner says that the information he found by the end of 2013 definitely showed him that “the pattern was real, using a completely different method.” The current study shows how a depleted range of nonces for processed blocks could identify the blocks that Patoshi mined. However, from the last article until now, there was not anything really to add to the other research.

While other studies in recent news suggest that there were only 700,000 coins mined by Patoshi, the latest study from Lerner offers “overwhelming probability” that it was one miner performing all of these extracts. Lerner’s data shows over a million BTC processed by Patoshi’s block verification, adding that timestamps on the work play a role as well.

Lerner provides multiple information on the way that the same computer doesn’t reverse its own timestamps typically, which shows when the blocks were mined. Computers can be unsynchronized, which means that the chronological order of mining these blocks would not necessarily be the same as if multiple computers were doing the work. Time inversions would be created between other computers, and Patoshi blocks show none of these inversions. While Lerner described himself as “open to considering other explanations,” he said this ultimately points to a single computer block that is run by Patoshi.

Adding to this interesting dataset, Lerner comments that there is a possible link between Patoshi patters and Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. However, rather than doing a deep dive into research on this link, he decided to stop where he was at and “leave Patoshi alone” now. He sees the evidence as more than enough for the public to see the truth, but denials from non-believers of his explanation are likely to arise.