Bitcoin Forum

While playing with some queries about coin age using bitcoin-abe (thanks John Toby) for this thread Satoshi Nakamoto - 1,5 million Bitcoins - We need answers (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=37333), I noticed a weird spike of "non-moved coins" in calendar week 9 of year 2011:



Then someone popped into my mind (drumroll): the MysteryMiner!

Remember him? If this was before your time, here's a little explanation: In the beginning of March 2011, a huge increase in hashrate happened, it didn't last very long (about a week?) If I remember correctly, it was determined the blocks came from a single ip, not sure, though. Someone on #bitcoin-dev coined the name "mysteryminer" for the person/group behind that.

• Is this a coincidence?
• If so: Why else the extreme spike in "kept coins" in week 9?
• If not: Did MM keep all these coins througout the price rallying to $30?
• If so, why?
• Did he loose them?

Any explanation is welcome ^^

EDIT: Any speculation also welcome

You do realize no one knows him. Thus we can't provide you with answers.

I was asking for speculations and maybe a list of nuggets mined by him?

Speculation != facts.

Here is some speculation. He is an alien. He used 0.000000000000000000001% of his actual processing power. But i have no facts to back this up.

An academic institute or intelligence service testing the network?

Nothing else can explain the sudden gigantic increase in hashing power ~6 months ago.
It would be too much work to set up for one miner (not to mention vastly unprofitable to run only for 1 week & disappear)

well i'll go the speculation on this one
if i was to make 400,000 btc ~6 months ago i'd be waiting for $10+ to sell, that is 4Million dollars - vastly unprofitable??????????? for 1weeks work and setup?

lmao

Yes, that would've been vastly profitable... So why didn't he sell? I don't get it.

Maybe the MM was using the resources of an unsympathetic employer and was discovered/fired after a week.  I'm sure hundreds of people have access to big hash power for "free" (others pay electricity etc.).

Cool graphs, and thanks for the donation!

Honestly, this is the closest explanation we have. GPU mining was popular at that point in time, but it in no way was being done on a grand scale. A system administrator for a gaming company or large 3d processing outfit would have both the tech and possibly the know-how for something like this. It could be that after running the operation it was determined to be too risky and they backed off. Or, they were caught and fired. It is possible that if this was all done on work computers, the coins might have even been destroyed if they were caught and their machine was wiped.

Unfortunately we cannot discern hoarding from loosing.

+1
It actually makes sense some Internet cafes frequented by gamers was probably all he needed.  afik most cafes don't have their own sysadmin so a potential suspect would have had access to 100+ gpus.

But I rather think he stopped b4 he got caught since he would still have a regular income.
In that case kudos to him.  8)

Sorry folks, I'm infrequent guest here, so when reading the topic title I suspected this is about me. Did someone accepted my challenge in my past postings and hacked my Windows-based computer and stole my coins or I managed to keep them secure in my wallet?

All my coins are safe and intact. You don't even know how much I have until You get them... :D

Nice Signature.

Well you don't make 400K BTC out of rainbows and unicorns.

To build the kind of server farm required to generate that many hashes in a week would be something like 100M in hardware.  So yeah to buy $100M in hardware, assemble it, mine for week, tear it down, sell the equipment so that hopefully somepoint in the future you could make $10M is very LMAO worthy.

Thanks! Don't know why there was no single user on this forum interested in this stuff. Maybe some think it's scam or trap. I don't care.The Mystery Miner was probably before I got seriously atracted to bitcoins, I heard about him only after I registered my nickname.

Unlikely that someone built the server farm for Bitcoin. Most likely the farm existed before, only he experimented and run the software for short time and probably the week after that discarded the coins as unnecesary. I know people who lost the wallets with 50+ coins mined to OS reinstallation, because they thinked the Bitcoin is worthless.

I deleted a wallet with 100 coins in 2009 because I realized it was pointless/worthless since the coins couldn't sold even for a penny. At the time this really just seemed like a professor's side project that was going to go nowhere.

I can't imagine how many people probably sold at $.01 because they had ten thousand coins and thought it was hilarious that people would actually pay money for them.

Also, I stand 100% behind what I originally said. It would not take millions of dollars to have generated enough gigahash to have competed in early February. There were only 200-400gh/s in the entire network. A system admin of a 10,000 PC network could have remotely run a miner getting between 5-10mh/s on each CPU, 50-100 gh/s. If he/she was clever enough to have come up with a way of using the video card, there really is no limit to the impact they could have had.

Other guesses, like a botnet herder and etc seem just as valid. I still prefer my guess, though, because I was contemplating the exact same thing at the time. Instead I purchased coins, and I'm more than happy that I did.

 Well, at the time with the difficulty only moving from 55k to 76k(march 9th 2011) This is about the area he peaked once at about 200GH then maxed out to just over ~495GH before just going *POOF*  Just wanted to provide some more accurate info to help in the speculation.

http://bitcoin.atspace.com/mm.png



Edit to add my conspiriacy theroy; I bet it was Satoshi, upset with the recent advent of GPU mining and wanting to bump the difficulty a bit to give time for more users to get on the bandwagon. i.e spread the wealth. ;p

Err not exactly meant as a compliment.

I get that DDoS is like 'protesting' on the internet, however I generally classify people that offer such services as shady, regardless of their intentions.
And no matter how I re-read your second statement, it sounds like a crude joke about a double spend attack.

What exactly does it mean? Has your DDoS services ever been used for what we would both consider immoral intent (e.g Bot-net taking down competitions website, compared to protesting taking down a child porn site)?

I think he's the first GPU miner.

Not my work, it came from www.bitcoinminer.com  They have a lot of very interesting data they have been gathering for quite some time.


  On another note, knowing what the difficulty was then and the time period MM was mining we can see he made no where near 400k coins... Some quick in my head math says more like, 14-16,000 BTC for his first stint from Feb 17th to Mar 1st, and then 18-22,000 BTC for Mar 4th to the evening of Mar 7th. Total maybe 42-45k BTC for all the short bursts combined with those two more stable periods. *shrug*

Even w/ a GPU half a terrahash is a lot of hashing power.  No way this was a garage full of mining rigs. 

It would need to be something exotic.

A botnet with a few million bots packs some processing power even if most of the machines are only suitable for CPU mining.

  I definetly can agree it wasn't a shed full of GPU's. It could easily have been a bot net orrr a large group of gpu enthusiast who already had equip in place for other such parallel projects that wanted to see what the whole 'bitcoin' thing was about.  Some more research into the time period and discussions going on there may shed some light on who it was and what they did it with.  I believe their IP is on record some place as that is how they were able to graph out MM seperatly from the rest of the network......

A network of 2,000 pcs with a crappy 8800GT can do 2,000 * 20 = 40,000 megahash. CPU mining on top of that can do maybe another 10-20 gigahash, and there are companies with tens of thousands of PCs with even better video cards in them. It is entirely feasible it was not a botnet, it was a system admin who simply got caught.

10k PCs with shitty Radeon 4850s can do 10,000 * 60 = 600,000 megahash/s

I'm tell you, it doesn't have to be a botnet operator when it could have been a rogue system admin(especially since it suddenly stopped).

What company has tens of thousands of machines with anything other than integrated video (likely some Intel POS)?

Some high end workstations might have better video cards but most business machines have the cheapest $1.50 videochip they can solder onto the motherboard.  Given integrated video can now do dual DVI output @ 1920x1200 there isn't much need for anything more.  

Also it wasn't 60GH/s it was 500GH/s and back when miner performance was significantly lower.  At 10MH/s per machine 500GH would be ~ 50,000 desktops.

Slightly off topic but pretty soon video cards in non-gaming computers are going to be extinct.  Both AMD and Intel now make CPU w/ built in graphics capabilities so no need even for integrating video into the north-bridge. Hell no reason even for a north-bridge at all.  Combine that w/ displayport supporting both daisychain and hubs (connect 2, 3, 4. 10+ monitors from a single displayport port) the need for even a basic graphics card is dying. 

For most consumers (and virtually all businesses) going forward there won't even be a reason (and in some cases choice) to buy a graphics card.  Not a good place to be in if your name is Nvidia.

I've recently been in south Korea. A lot of these people are gamers. The seldomly own their own machines, but go to "PC"-places. Good gfx-cards there, many machines. There's a lot of these places, I mean: a lot of them. I can't understand Korean language, but maybe there are some chains. They also have custom XP installs on these systems... who knows, someone might provide service for a lot of these places and is maybe able to centrally configure machines to mine?

My bet is on a "borrowed" GPU or FPGA cluster.
More likely than a botnet with 10,000 $150 GPUs.

-rph

  Aye, APU ftw with the American market for sure. I was peeping out some of the statistics for pre-built(i.e. HP, Dell, etc) computer sales and it was pretty apparent that American buyers have the absolute lowest percentage of purchases with a dedicated GPU added on. A quick search on the new APU's should supply the stats so I will not attempt to quote them from my poor memory.

  Yea, not sure what Nvidia's plans are for the very near future with APU's, Intel/AMD appear out for blood to get more of a strangle hold on the market share from them.  With IE9, etc adding built in support for AMD's 'Vision Engine' technology, things be looking real good for for them this coming year. For your OT reading pleasure, http://www.amd.com/us/products/technologies/Pages/vision-engine.aspx
  Note also; Systems powered by AMD APUs include AMD VISION Engine Software
■Includes AMD Catalyst™ Graphics driver, Vision Engine Control Center, and AMD’s driver for OpenCL™

  A small part of my Nvidia fanboyness just died a little. ;p


  Back 'On Topic';  I think before we can truly speculate further about what they were using we should do the research to see just 'who' it was....


Aye, especially considering most of the World Community Grid, Boinic, etc projects are more CUDA focused instead of the Int-OP focus that sha hashing utilizes with the ATI cards.

You can clasify me as you see fit, I don't care. The second line is not crude joke about double spend, it's crude joke about getting your wallet.dat :D

It means what it means. I don't consider taking competitors website offline for some time immoral. The competition in capitalism is fierce, and if someone from corporation one says that corporation two products are inferior and theyr boss have small penis, there comes the immoral services. On other side I don't consider taking down child porn website a heroic thing. There is few if any CP websites in plain internet, and if the small minority of pedos can jerk to pictures and don't harm the little girl or boy next door, let they get there stuff and release the pressure.

Generally I offer to bring out the treasures from closed and private parts on hacking forums to people who can pay me.Would'nt it feel better now if of You saved the file somewhere for later time or just simply sent them to me?Classic botnets with CPU mining will not tolerate CPU mining for long, peoplw will start noticing the 100% load because it will for them make the workstations useless as shit. 1 week of CPU mining before noticable reduction in numbers is my estaminate. Probably the coins was inexpensive back then and the operator used the botnet for other more profitable or more fun purposes.

At this time all built in graphics solution sucks for real gaming, and it's going to be a long way before intel can implement something remotely comparable to what Nvidia has to offer. (I skipped ATI / AMD for obvious reasons :))

For hardcore gaming you may be right but honestly it doesn't really matter.  Intel craptastic (I am talking pre Sandy Bridge utter garbage, the utter garbage that couldn't even run Win7 properly and resulted in lawsuits) graphics chips have gained it ...... 57% of GPU markethsare world wide.

With Sandy Bridge, decent Aero performance, multi display support, HD video, and casual gaming how high do you think on-Chip GPU marketshare can go.  Nvidia is locked out of that market.  It will be split 3:1 between Intel and AMD.  AMD got a win w/ xbox 360 which had to sting NVidia.   Next gen consoles have taken a bite out of high end PC gaming and that is Nvidia only real market left.

Splitting the 20% and shrinking marketshare of PC that actually use a discrete GPU?  Would you want to base your business model on that?

This is on top of AMD & Intel killing the chipset market.  AMD/Intel both moved more and functionality into the CPU that nortbridges aren't needed.  That combined with accelerating development cycles and high speed propreitary busses to southbridge knocked Nvidia out of the chipset market almost completely. 5 years ago Nvidia moved a decent number of chipsets (nForce), onboard video, and discrete video.  Only one product line is even alive anymore and ATI/AMD merger gives AMD graphics deeper pockets and  access to higher volume pricing.

If I had put to put money in AMD, Intel or NVidia it would be Intel.  AMD a distant second, and NVidia a "God please don't make me do that".
I like NVidia tech but honestly hardcore games think to much about the ultra high end and forget the billions are made on the other 99% of the market.

This is called hoarding a large portion of the minted coins and holding on them to drive the price of BTC up, whoever wants to see BTC suceed is doing this. KnC is doing it today with their datacentres, they mine months before with their "new hardware", they never take it offline either. They sit on all the coins they mined, a few months later they manufacture the same amount of hash power that they have in their data center with the same tech, and ship it out to everyone else at a set price. As soon as retail miners receive them it's easy to see that they won't ROI, KnC knows this aswell as they control most of the network either way. After all the batches arrive to customers (38 million $ worth for neptunes right now), no ROI in sight = miners hoard coins, as KnC has also hoarded all coins for months before with no intention of selling, artificial scarcity happens, retail miners hold their coins and the price drives up on the exchanges. If these big mining manufacturers wanted to crash the market, they could right now. Do you seriously think that there is 7-11 billion dollars sustaining the current bitcoin price? Hell no. Probably 10-100 million. KnC has a kill switch, questions to ask yourself - 1) Do they want Bitcoin to succeed? 2) What are their real motives? Is it just to sell hardware? That mystery miner in 2011 held all the coins it mined, that's what caused the price spike shortly after.

Satoshi = KnC?

My vote is it was a botnet attack for sure !! 2009 was a big year for crackdown and discovery of huge botnet systems and this might of been one of the last ditch efforts of getting everything they could out of there botnet controlled computer networks. Over 1 million computers where at the power of some of these botnet cyber gangs and it had to be one of them. Here is a link for the cyberwar time frame by years.. Notice the crackdown in security that just happens to be in 2009. For the most part the botnets used would just get personal info and credit card numbers as they tryed to limit system performance loss so the virus could hide easier.. I bet they started feeling the pressure and decided to use full power of all computers as long as they could mining bitcoin ...   


http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0307/Cyberwar-timeline

simple

i time travelled with a usb hub and eruptors

best explanation

Or the PIXAR render farm......

I will be doing another time travel in the next week, anyone with experience please contact me.

You will have the opportunity to withdraw MTGOX funds, so this could be good for everyone!

http://www.symantec.com/connect/sites/default/files/users/user-2935611/zeroaccess_blog_infographic.png

http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/grappling-zeroaccess-botnet

ok, but: did they keep they coins? ;-)

Hell they're probably stealing more coins as we speak via trojans, keyloggers....