Bitcoin Forum

A  picture is worth a thousand words.

http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/

This obviously contradicts every word GMaxwell and DeathAndTaxes said about mining during the first year.

Best regards,
 Sergio.

What if he got hit by a bus? (or something with the same result: abandoned 1 million coins.)

Yes, Satoshi Nakamoto is genius.  ;D ;D ;D

Can you go into more depth about this 'ExtraNonce field' and what it is.  Also can you extend your analysis to see other larger miners, the red dots in the graph clearly show similar parallel upward slope trends and should be able to be parsed out into a few more 'entities'.  Also dose this methodology work as a tool after the introduction of mining pools?

How many addresses are utilized in this 'Nonce closure' group and how dose combining it with the conventional closure methods change the picture?  What percentage of the network hash-rate did the entity represent during that period?  If its mining at a steady rate and we know the number of blocks it won it should be simple to determine its hash-power which as you said looks to be steady, is it consistent with a single PC?

The black lines are steeper than all the red ones. Does that mean "Satoshi"'s computer was faster than all the others?

Also the single red line with varying angle is interesting. Looks like the cpu got into thermal throttling or something.

"The mystery will be revealed in 3 days from now".

Heh, I was wondering if I needed to start convincing people that I am not satoshi... Now it will not be needed if satoshi's identity can be revealed.

An incrementing nonce is more secure but benefits are probably negligible with random nonce.

Among the black lines in the second half year are some that have a different slope. Some steeper, and some flater. Why do you think these are Satoshi, too?

The extraNonce fields increments every time the nonce fields (which is 32 bits) overflows, so it's a slow realtime clock, until the application is restarted, in which case it goes back to 1.  

All this questions are very interesting and can be answered with good quite precision.
I´m sure many of the users who frequent the technical forum are completely capable of computing all these metrics.

I offer  the source data sets for anyone interested. For myself, I won't dig into this more for now, since I need do do more urgent work.

Note the X-Axis in the graphs is not time (as it's said). It's the block number (that's a mistake I did yesterday at 4 AM).

That may distort the slope a bit, but almost imperceptibly.

I said that "at eyesight" he has spent none. Obviously there may be imperceptible red dot's between the heavy black lines, and Satoshi probably spent some.

Interesting. Paw prints of the bear ...  :)

Edit: maybe one could observe ArtForz's legendary mining exploits in those early times with similar analysis.

From the coinbase of block 9 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2818.msg38684#msg38684)

I think its that the peaking of one line coincides with the beginning of the next one so perfectly and they are slope-wise so consistent with trend so far, if they are not the 'black' entity then they have nearly identical hash-rate and the black entity stopped mining at exactly the same moment, very unlikely.

The red lines all have considerable lower slopes so they are clearly on slower machines and their are multiple machines their because the lines occupy the same space on the X axis rather then doing the saw-tooth that the black line dose.  From the looks of it their were 2-3 people who mined a lot slower but at steady rates very early and they actually would mine for considerably longer stretches before shutting down, this probably reflects a lower concern for backing-up their wallets.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Whatever, man.  I just don't give a shit about what Satoshi's got, how he got it, or about who he really is, either.

Hey look, Sergio - you're really good at this blockchain analysis stuff.  Better than anyone I've seen in the past three years, anyway (not that I devote a lot of time to quantifying that).

Why aren't you using your skills to do something useful?

For example:  why don't you analyze the recent crash, and separate out all the bitcoin that was used specifically to purposefully harm the bitcoin economy; find out where those bitcoin came from and how they were accumulated; and if the entity(ies) that sold them bought back in or were just cashing out?

And just as an aside that has no impact on anyone else, don't you think MtGox, or one of the big players/speculators with serious money on the line would be willing to pay you pretty well for some verifiable information of that kind?

You might as well be drinking Jolt Cola in your parents' basement - doing what you're doing now.  What good are these skills of yours if you waste them like this?

Satoshi is Tony Stark

GMaxwell has found that after  October 2010 (e.g. v0.3.14), clients clear ExtraNonce periodically, so this method would not work for periods dominated with  higher Bitcoin versions

How does this contradict anything at all that I or death and taxes said?  In fact, it seems to __thoroughly__ refute the claim you were making that Satoshi mined alone the first year. Unlike you, however, I'm not going back and editing my posts when people point out that they cannot possibly be correct.

Why do you keep posting all these claims without even bothering to look at the source?

I am Satoshi

http://imageshack.us/a/img507/5590/satoshit.png

There is a principle in the universe that what can be done, will be done. I don't think we should blame Sergio if he mines public information. Or should we get rid of Julian Assange, too?  ::)

Sergio --> Assange?  Interesting conflation.  I see no points of congruency there...

In you paper, you say it like Satoshi out of all of us has the most trust in bitcoin. I think there is an equally valid argument that explains his not cashing out. It is that "for cashing out that mil he need to release his identity." I like the work you are doing though!

Well, I Do! I own three companies, one is pentatek.com, a leader developer or Neurophisiology Equipment in Latam. Another Certimix.com aims to license my patents regarding Mental Poker Protocols. The third information security company is in stealth state until all our patents have been filled.


Bitcoin is my hobby right now, from 2 AM to 4 AM, a few days a week. The kind of block chain analysis you propose requires a lot of effort and precision, testing, double-checking, because it involves criminal acts, cannot be undertaken lightly, something completely different from my dawn hacks.
 
Very few people have asked me for help regarding Bitcoin, and MtGox is not one of them. Bitcoin community is full of hackers and brilliant developers, so I go unnoticed :)

If MtGox ever ask me to, and the pay is good, it would be nice to do it professionally...


Best regards, Sergio.
 

I always stated that Satoshi was mining ALMOST alone. I specially used this vague word in every sentence to state that I could not prove he was alone.

If you analyze the different segments at different slopes in the graph you will see that Satoshi was ALMOST alone at any time, maybe with 3 or 4 other miners with much less capable mining hardware.

GMax: I appreciate you and your work. Let's stop this chicken and egg controversy on the accuracy of things said that is not useful for the remaining Bitcoin forum readers.
Please sent me a private e-mail if you want to discuss more about it.
 

I think you mean, why don't you do something that doesn't threaten the bitcoin economy. Confirming or nearly confirming that satoshi does indeed have 1m+ bitcoins is not good news for the knob slobbers.

Price is up $15 since he posted that picture ... maybe market feels better if satoshi has got the keys to the kingdom than god only knows who?

 8)

I'm really very glad that you all have increased your savings value. I hope the coin goes up much more.
That's a sign that honesty and transparency help valuate the bitcoin. 

I've created my first Bitcoin address today. If you've earned a lot of money and want to send me a tip, here is my public addr: 17mcFB7Xyymd9hxp2bgNPz1ruWsdoPoCnZ

:)

Want to correct this hyperbole, now?

Funny... for being the same person, Satoshi's "clock" sure has a funny way of going backward in time, and then picking up immediately where it left off... or even choosing a different format altogether.  This is all in the first 12 hours of Bitcoin's public existence.  Interesting bits are colored.  Bold is just to make it easier to see the which part is changing.

**EDIT** Added blocks 6-9 for additional context, fixed wrong link on #10..  Block 9 is known to have been mined by "Satoshi".

Block #	coinbase	Link
1	04ffff001d0104	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/00000000839a8e6886ab5951d76f411475428afc90947ee320161bbf18eb6048
...
6	04ffff001d0123	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/000000003031a0e73735690c5a1ff2a4be82553b2a12b776fbd3a215dc8f778d
7	04ffff001d012b	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/0000000071966c2b1d065fd446b1e485b2c9d9594acd2007ccbd5441cfc89444
8	04ffff001d012c	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/00000000408c48f847aa786c2268fc3e6ec2af68e8468a34a28c61b7f1de0dc6
9	04ffff001d0134	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/000000008d9dc510f23c2657fc4f67bea30078cc05a90eb89e84cc475c080805
10	04ffff001d0136	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/000000002c05cc2e78923c34df87fd108b22221ac6076c18f3ade378a4d915e9
11	04ffff001d013b	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/0000000097be56d606cdd9c54b04d4747e957d3608abe69198c661f2add73073
12	04ffff001d010c	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/0000000027c2488e2510d1acf4369787784fa20ee084c258b58d9fbd43802b5e
13	04ffff001d013c	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/000000005c51de2031a895adc145ee2242e919a01c6d61fb222a54a54b4d3089
14	04ffff001d013e	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/0000000080f17a0c5a67f663a9bc9969eb37e81666d9321125f0e293656f8a37
15	04ffff001d010a	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/00000000b3322c8c3ef7d2cf6da009a776e6a99ee65ec5a32f3f345712238473
...
20	04ffff001d0120	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/00000000174a25bb399b009cc8deff1c4b3ea84df7e93affaaf60dc3416cc4f5
...
25	04ffff001d0141	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/000000008e35a1d59ea1be8d76683662f47fd13c62a9e347ad5845a26f762026
26	04ffff001d0105	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/0000000041438e52d25bccab8798a92cabafdaad69a071d3d2a41718faf01098
27	04ffff001d0110	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/0000000071350772f98f84babf35502b33d42ee8466d3dde0f376c4120352081
28	04ffff001d0109	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/00000000bb0d9430d3d1bab474be5050342161efcca9f7e45b151bff9a700944
29	04ffff001d010d	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/00000000c57a1b6351208c592eef8eff015d93c899a047fe35b35252a4a59bcb
30	04ffff001d0121	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/00000000bc919cfb64f62de736d55cf79e3d535b474ace256b4fbb56073f64db
...
37	04ffff001d0157	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/00000000ddd96d128e122d1179034ff66c27dc583eb9e8996a0b1779c60c6f86
38	04ffff001d0107	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/000000007c19ee8e924d3024d58efff50f872aadf256140bb1e3d62fea4fd6dd
39	04ffff001d0109	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/000000005665d506f6c3ccb5fd98624f9816a8a169f1d2327d1d4d6d3262ad12
40	04ffff001d010e	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/00000000b2f01f399bf503e55f25a1aa51067056d2eb81915cb91976968b69aa
...
50	04ffff001d013f	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/0000000026f34d197f653c5e80cb805e40612eadb0f45d00d7ea4164a20faa33
...
57	04ffff001d017a	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/000000004ff375707d7128dd2b080da4185727d534ea1b0aeac5877e00547391
58	04ffff001d028200	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/0000000075b4df54f33c4e60cf88c5dd6a6455f16f4fbe220ae81e157ce32ef1
...
63	04ffff001d029f00	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/00000000ebff91c88984bff39511f544a1c4ef6ec4f33e2ea531e47c2685628e
64	04ffff001d0106	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/0000000031975f17c5642a9c7e53ae4201a70a6ba6363036b55497b8754d1866
65	04ffff001d02a100	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/00000000aae47d47b6ff5eda6abab09cd6720684b1368eac70ac4240b3c90250
...
72	04ffff001d02c700	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/0000000082c0abb2875dc690a243dce6cbc856647b6422abbe82f97a3a7b127a
73	04ffff001d0101	https://blockexplorer.com/rawblock/000000008ec9525cb2092c6bd7d1c2580e595bcfa54bac51cf6f0278b242f25d
...

Do you mean that I should remove that sentence from the post?
If you or Gavin ask me to do it, then I'll do it.

What you see are different THREADS of the same PC. Possibly two or four threads were running concurrently.
Each thread has it own ExtraNonce, but all threads are started almost at the same time.

Is the periodic reset due to rebooting the machine ? Each week or so or on a given day ?

Nonsense.  Are you trying to tell me that the threads that found blocks 10-15 were started "almost at the same time", yet the "thread" that found block #12 was 47 X 2^32 hashes behind the one(s) that found #11 and #13?  I call BS.  And what about #58, #63, #65..?

No, I didn't mean so. These are probably different machines, My apologize. Deltas of 1 may be threads of the same PC.
 

I estimate the PC is rebooted every 100 hours or 4 days.

I think this is for backing up wallets, but I'm unsure..

Interesting, I was thinking of code to analyze this, who knew miners would pop out like this when graphed! I also am pulling my own stats out with bitcointools, but at a block a second, it takes a while. My stats add nonce, time, a spent status, and # of transactions to the table of extranonces, but I don't thing I will bother with writing my own analysis code.

http://bitslog.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/all10-5.jpg (image is wacky so just a link)

I see an interesting aspect, that the extranonce of the non-spending satoshi miner (if it is correct that red=spent and black=unspent) is increasing about four times as fast as others - it's steeper block finding slope indicates that it is significantly lower at block finding than it should be. Remember, computers are not competing against each other during this whole run, they are competing against the difficulty.

I believe this is because this miner is using different code than the released Bitcoin. It may have a getwork-style mining, where multiple CPUs are mining through it, and part of this increases the nonce faster than the block finding rate of the released Bitcoin. The nonce may increase faster if Satoshi was discarding fast block finds to make the block rate more regular (which they are statistically - pull out and analyse one series of increasing extranonces). Something that we see at about 1/10th, and again at 5/8ths of the chart, that the slope changes (along with a daily block rate change), I think that there was some change made in its code or the number of miners configured, maybe Satoshi added something that made the miner inefficient for few weeks and fixed it, or tweaked code to discard any blocks faster than a "heartbeat".

There is one scenario where I think this makes sense: Satoshi created a special "network-supporting" miner. This special always-on miner with it's own code base may have never created permanent keys or had a wallet - in that NOTHING appears spent from it's mining.

Without an always-on miner for people to try out the currency and keep confirmations rolling (and another node for them to connect to), the money would just plain not work. This miner runs different code than the release others are running, evidenced by the identical slopes of everyone else. This may be the "x" IRC username connecting over Tor - it would listen for IP addresses to connect to but normal bitcoins couldn't get it's IP address from IRC.


Another thing interesting is that you can see other black lines in the graph, other people mined for a while with release code and have never spent their generates. We know some people have early 50BTCs, but we can also surmise a few of these lines may be lost coins.

There is no evidence to support this. In fact this disagrees with your discovery that most mining was done by one rolling extranonce. It may have been Bitcoin #1 + xMiner, as referenced in my previous posting thread. Remember, Bitcoin 0.1.0 doesn't mine unless it has a node connected to it - it counts the nodes, and if the number is 0 or has changed to 0, mining is disabled.

The Satoshi super miner might not have started until Satoshi's normal Bitcoin or another regular Bitcoin user was also connected. Satoshi may have a wallet with his own coins, but never will use the backbone miner's coins. New miner at #64 may be Hal getting Bitcoin working.

Please take into account that X-Axis is not time, but block number.

Here is the same data, but with the Time in the X-Axis.
http://bitslog.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/all-t1000-5.gif

+1 for transparency

Thanks again for the interesting research.

Yes, that looks about the same due to the regularity of block finds, but it shows the satoshi miner lines as bending less than your previous graph when there is competition also finding blocks and advancing the block count. More transactions happening on the network will also steepen the lines - network activity increases everyone's extranonce counter faster.

The mean block finding rate at difficulty 1 is one block every 4295032833.0 hashes (just a bit more than 2³²).
By analyzing the code, the mean value of independent miner's extranonce increments should be 2.000015 (without transactions or someone else's block finds muddying the increment). That more extranonces are being "used up" by the "backbone miner", we know it does something different than everyone else's bitcoin.

Another interesting thing (hard to do at that low resolution), draw an imaginary vertical line through the graph and see how many miner lines it crosses, there are quite a few at any given point.

There's a few "birds" floating above the second half of the graph, somebody is using a different style of coinbase than difficulty + bignum ("ffff001d" + extranonce bytes + extranonce encoded) or you are parsing it wrong.

It is known that the generation of block 9 belongs to Satoshi, and was sent to Hal Finney as the first transaction on the blockchain.

https://blockchain.info/block/000000008d9dc510f23c2657fc4f67bea30078cc05a90eb89e84cc475c080805

Is it one of the "black dots"?

I believe this is hugely bullish on bitcoin. The likelihood of "early coins on the move", has been reduced significantly. Not a wonder that the price shot up.

It should be black red if you could see it and the spents are colored correctly, it was spent in block 170.

That is part of the first miner run count up from block 1-14. Nonconsecutive miner joins are at blocks 12, and apparent restarts at 15 and 18, though there is a good amount of start/restart/join/concurrent activity in the first few hundred blocks that can't be seen in the chart.

I meant exactly what I said in my post, as a whole thing - not what you pick or choose to see.

I don't believe any entity with 1M bitcoin is a threat to any of us - white or black hats.  What is the incentive for anyone to damage the source of such wealth?

We've just seen what happens when a million or so gets dumped:  it's annoying.

The coins could be publicly destroyed.  So what?

And those are real actions, not merely the discovery of information; which is what Sergio is doing.  I can see the intellectual attraction of figuring out what Satoshi mined, but personally I find the idea abhorrent - especially when considering that every piece of information teased out of the fabric of reality is only one more step to revealing Satoshi's identity. 

And really, it is Satoshi's identity that lies at the core of these efforts.  All of them.

'He' wants to remain anonymous, and I am ethically constructed in such a way that a request like that - from someone who has done no harm to anyone - is inviolate.  On a political level, violating the privacy of someone who has requested it is a construct of the extreme right or the extreme left (which meet, of course, at authoritarianism) - and there is no question in my mind that the undercurrents surrounding Satoshi's expressed desire to remain anonymous are valid:  he would be in personal danger if it were known for sure who he was.

But of course, there are those who believe that their personal curiosity outweighs anything that any other human on the planet might desire for themselves.  To them I offer a subscription to The Enquirer.

I think this is an overstatement at this point. Bitcoin is up and running, and "they" cannot coerce anything out of Satoshi, nor influence the network functioning. There are people with much greater leverage in Bitcoin economy now. As far as I know, no one has been in any danger because of owning bitcoins so far.

Cool if he wants to remain anonymous. What if he is just an uninteresting nerd anyway.. How long do you think the media would be interested? Two weeks maybe. "Mysterious Satoshi drives a Toyota and rolls his toilet paper from left to right." LOL

I believe you may be mistaken.  And I have not in any way expressed that it is Satoshi's ownership of significant quantities of bitcoin that lead him to believe he could be at risk.  Not that it matters to me - simply expressing the desire for privacy is sufficient, as far as I'm concerned.

However... here is but one question, among many surrounding Satoshi:

What are the implications of holding the private key to Block 0?  I assume Satoshi does - and spendable or not, hard-coded or not, it has such a key.  Would anyone who knows more about it than I (a very large cohort  :P ) care to comment?

Would selling 1M bitcoins do no harm to anyone? What you want is for this information to remain hidden because it is very damaging to bitcoin's reputation. No one who has not invested in bitcoins gives a shit about who Satoshi is. What they will care about is that this mysterious inventor has the currency by the balls.

Why is there conflict between Sergio, jgarzik, and gmaxwell?

There you are, picking and choosing what you want to see - again - and from sequential paragraphs in the same post, no less.

I'm the one picking what I want to see? You are the deluded person who thinks that determining how much BTC satoshi controls is the same as revealing his identity and that is your pathetic reasoning for telling Sergio to do something useful. You are the one that believes protecting satoshi's identity is more important than informing people about the hidden dangerous of bitcoin. Gee I wonder why.

Oh.  And you're a fool if you believe that.

Entirely aside from the fact that I haven't expressed that, and certainly don't appreciate having words put in my mouth...

There are exactly two things that have happened during the rise of bitcoin that - together - have done more for the adoption of the currency than all the others (reddit, Wikileaks, OWS, WordPress, Seals With Clubs, and all the others - more and more; faster and faster).  They are:

The disappearance of Satoshi and 'his' continuing anonymity, and

The purchase of two pizzas for 10k BTC.

Anyone who wants the currency to succeed understands that.  You, of course - from what I'm able to glean from your postings - clearly want bitcoin to fail.

This analysis uses nothing but data in public domain. Won't you think CSI has already done the same analysis? Some serious, big investors may have done the same analysis too

The second half of the graph definitely doesn't look very convincing. Also, is it known for sure that any of the black dots are Satoshi's blocks?

I hope that Satoshi does have a lot of bitcoins. He definitely deserves them, and it's better that he have them than someone else. He mined them fair and square -- this is not equivalent to premining.

I doubt that Satoshi threw those bitcoins away...

Indeed.

I think by definition black dots are unspent and therefore difficult to be linked with Satoshi. The most interesting is the linkage of the red dots with Satoshi, and their statistical relationship with those black dots. Block 9 is sure, and I think there are possibly other known public transactions.

How do these graphs help identify him?

Okay, so let me offer a third viewpoint, which is different than either of yours:

Bitcoin's rise in 2013 can be attributed to people like me, who have the $$ to buy in the open market. Therefore my opinions matter, as they represent a large group of very high purchasing power which, when deployed, will raise Bitcoin to a next level. I think:

- It is good if Satoshi's identity is revealed. Sorry for him, in case he wanted to stay anonymous. It was perhaps a coolness factor in 2012, but now we are talking about serious old school people who don't like surprises.
- It is good that the early coins belong to Satoshi, as it seems that they were not generated to be spent, even if it were technically possible.
- Even if the 1M coins were to be sold, it would not have any more lasting effect to the price than adjusting the price by 5-10% while keeping the marketcap. No killswitch lol. I own 5% of a certain company, nobody ever thought I would have a killswitch.

I don't know that the graph supposed to be convincing by itself. It just shows data in the blockchain, and red dots are coinbase transactions that have been spent, black dots are unspent generates. Any interpretation besides "there is one continuously-running strange-code miner with all-unspent coins" is up to you. In fact it's probably best if most people keep their interpretations to themselves.

Of these three points of yours, we agree on one-and-a-half.

I disagree on Satoshi's identity - not only on ethical grounds, but on pure marketing grounds.  You're heavily invested.  I'm assuming you'd like the value to go up - which essentially means adoption must increase.  Seriously:  can you even buy that kind of marketing tool?  "Shadowy cypherpunk creator, steeped in anonymity..."  It's like the intro to the Lone Ranger, but for the 21st century.

Yes, it is good that the early coins belong to Satoshi.  But I suspect he'll be spending them, by and by.  And it is certainly technically possible for him to do so.

We are in point-to-point agreement on that last.

Why?

Because, at the lowest level, there is always conflict between those who create history and the historians who make an effort to document it.

It seems to me the best explanation so far.

He wrote a proof of concept, bitcoin gui 0.1.0, and then hacked it up to have something generating a block every ten minutes, and maybe throw away faster blocks, just to be able to have transactions happening.

This proof of concept received a lackluster acceptance and there is a quote of him saying that he chose a very low difficulty and he did so, IMHO, to make it easier to have a regular and evenly spaced flow of blocks which were required to give a good experience to those testing it.

Given it was a proof of concept the value of the generated coins was zero and so he could throw away blocks without caring for the minted coins.

spiccioli

So instead of a hand full of rich cypherpunks there is one filthy rich genius. Valued in dollar at current market price he owns about 0.15% of what Bill Gates owns.

What are the implications of this...

- There exists a single person that most likely has access to ~10% of all coins currently in existence.
- A single guy will potentially spend all those coins slower than several persons.
- Should it really be Satoshi he will be extra careful not to hurt his lifework.
- ?

And if the Bitcoin price should rise much further - I can only imagine what good for the world a genius could do with that kind of dough. What is next after freeing money - freeing education? Freeing voting?

If you have bitcoins, you don't need much education or voting any more.

I will make it simple. If I did not uncovered this data set yesterday, some else would have done it, surrounded by much worse descriptive words. What I did is not ingenious. Is the most evident method of data mining. The data was there at plain sight.

I put all my effort in my blog post to calm the market showing the truth: that Satoshi or whoever mined them had not used the coins to distort the market, and I succeed, since the BTC price increased afterwards.

Can you imagine how yellow journalism would have handled this information to discredit the coin ?

So please stop blaming me for having uncovered Satoshi or whoever fortune: it was already uncovered.

That's not the impression I got from the blog post, I thought you meant that satoshi DID spend money.

Also, Satoshi's coins may now be valued at 100 million USD, however if Bitcoin hits mainstream where 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000351(and this is very inaccurate example) is your salary, imagine what having a million bitcoins would mean. It would mean he would have money enough to buy a continent and he could control the world.

But by then, the majority of people will agree that at least 75% of Satoshi's coins have to be blocked from being valid in the chain.

How Satoshi mining pattern disappears...

http://bitslog.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/start-36288-stop-72576-x-15000-y-15-c16.png

You know, I have a feeling he is reading this thread as we speak.

Please point me out where it seems that, maybe my English was not precise enough to express it.


I've never thought about this kind of confiscation. But it would be terribly non-equitative, brutal, and not useful, since maybe there is other people holding as much as that coins, but in hundreds of small transaction outputs.

I wish he would just sends us some words... I wonder if he will be grateful or annoyed at my posts. I hope he is well enough not to worry.

Satoshi is watching you especially.

... and you and you and all of us, lololol.

deepceleron's theory of a 'auto-mininer' run by Satoshi that existed just to give the network a consistent block interval and which intentionally lost all it's coins seems logical given the total lack of spending on those coins.  But why wouldn't such a detail not have been made public long ago?  Why would such a miner use different addresses rather then not a clearly void address for which no private key could exist, it's trivial to do this and Satoshi would have know how.  If deepceleron's theory is correct it also implies that Satoshi didn't make the slightest effort to inform the community he was destroying a large chunk of the theoretical potential 21M coins?  Did he want people to believe those Million or so coins were liquid and could be sold?

It would be more secure to generate blocks with completely random pubkeys (which is exactly what Bitcoin does when it generates). If all the coinbase public keys had reduced address space or something in common, that could make their funds an attack target of weaker strength than normal addresses. There is no 64 bit public key for which a private key cannot theoretically exist and still be a valid point on the appropriate elliptic curve, which is required for implementation of public key validation.

If they were intended to be obviously discarded, they could claim a 1 base unit reward instead of 50 bitcoins, but this would likely just confuse people more - there wouldn't actually be 21M BTC and you would see other speculation and wild theories.

I think Satoshi is still tripping balls from Silk Road stuff since day he disappeared.

The idea of auto miner is logical but nothing supports it. As the coins were almost zero value and he might just as well fund faucet with them back then. Or he still have the original keys and don't care about spending them to buy yacht or collection of supercars. He probably already have all things he want and what can be purchased with money. Not everybody want to have yachts, private islands and supercars.

I think it would be hilarious if a majority of the miners (and I suppose the community would have to agree) decided to set a date where coins still unspent from blocks prior to say 30,000 would become unspendable. Then we could answer the question of satoshi's intentions once and for all.

That won't happen. That would mean Satoshi only need spend some coins to fork the blockchain. Which you still may find hilarious.

Which is why I said the community would have to agree since they'd have to voluntarily use the fork with the change. However, you only need a 75% majority of miners because 49% can power the network while the 26% 51% attack the 25% left.

Is it the same time when he disappeared on this forum?

Nice work, Sergio. And please don't let them grind you down - I mean the fuckwits who think ignorance is EVER preferable to knowledge (and especially for markets!).

Some thing I wonder: If every block generated by Satoshi belongs to a different address, how many addresses he has to manage? I suppose that the early version of client have only one address per wallet? So if he have 1 million coin he has to manage 20000 wallets? At a time that no one knows if bitcoin will success or not, he backup 600 wallets every 100 hour??

I suppose that if he would like to accumulate all the coins generated by him, he would have transferred all the coins to a few addresses, to be able to manage. I think that setting up a bot miner's scenario is more resonable

(And even if he owned 5% of total amount of coin, comparing with central banks owned every USD when they issue it, it's still very very little)

No. Early versions had most of the functionality that Bitcoin-Qt's GUI has now.

Surprise-o-meter: 0%

One interesting observation about this graph is about two months after "Satoshi disappears". At that point a new, and from the looks of it, very efficient miner starts working, with a very similar (identical?) "slope" as with Satoshi miner. Lots of those coins are spent.

Of course, any vertical looking slope will look a lot like Satoshi miner.

That would be knightmb (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=6825.msg973679#msg973679), who made mad coin with thousands of dollars of Amazon compute cloud.

deblurred July 24, 2010 screenshot for you:
http://we.lovebitco.in/img/knightmb.png

Cheese guys, soon you will be able to match all BTC1,000 paperwallets with their owners, and I start to feel queasy.  :-\

This is all Extremely interesting.

Why would Satoshi's xMiner bother to do the work to generate blocks during particular seconds or minutes if it doesn't want blocks at that time? Why not pause generation and continue when too much time has gone by without any blocks?

Thats kind of an unfortunate privacy bug.  Coincidentally I thought about and fixed a few potential issues like this in hashcash (it was originally designed for anti-DoS for remailers as well as anti-spam for email so privacy and linkability mattered).  (hashcash is the bitcoin mining function).

The way I did it is to have a separate field dedicated to adding the randomness to avoid start collisions (two miners choosing the same stamp/coin) and then I just used a never decreasing counter for the mining.  Simples QED.

For Satoshi now - maybe he can find a private buyer via a lawyer and swiss banking services.

Or perhaps we're forced to implement zerocoin to protect him :)

Anyway dont sweat people - he can probably get by on a few $M play money from his post privacy bug fix mining hoard until there's a solution on his post.  (When was that bug fixed btw?  Cant tell from those low res graphs).  And hes' probably holding out for the $10k bitcoin era anyway.

Adam

Satoshi needs to come out of retirement (under another Nym of course) to implement zero-coin level privacy so he can move his millions around  ;)

Take it to the next level satoshi, show us what ya got.

Well, if you want to help Satoshi out,  go build a nice system for anonymously participating in something like this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=139581.0

:P

I for one dont think Satoshi is just watching how things evolve and is probably on this board under another nickname or multiple nicknames. Time will tell how he deals with the continuing Bitcoin mania.

there he is

Here, on Oct 09, 2010, Satoshi announced "SVN rev 163 (ver 0.3.13.3) has the key pool feature.  Pre-generated new keys are aged in a queue before use, so that backups of wallet.dat hold keys you'll use in the future."

http://www.bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1414.0 (http://www.bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1414.0)

Before that, I don't know how the block generation addresses are handled

Wallets still had multiple keys, they just weren't pooled. The key pool feature makes backups much safer.

Interesting. What block does the Satoshi pattern disappear on, exactly?

Someone moved the coinbase reward from blocks 2800, 2816, 2884, 3182, 3194 today: https://www.blockseer.com/g/75j3281Osaeu

This person claims he's the owner of these coins, and he's not Satoshi: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3ln3sp/it_was_me/

Does your analysis still hold, given the new information?

That reddit user claimed he moved those coins hours after they had been moved. Also, someone asked him to sign a message to prove he controls those addresses, and he hasn't done it yet. I'll only believe it after he proves it by signing a message, or announcing his intentions to move specific coins in advance. I've become skeptical of any claims of ownership of vast amounts of coins, or ownership of very early coins because it's very rare anyone provides conclusive proof of their claims.

He signed the output address with 265BTC:

http://coinig.com/?adr=1HUidFPHZ7cJ6WYmR8nMPQCmmE3mbVKYjM&msg=It+was+me+20%2F9%2F2015&sig=IC8oSnQ%2BCNMhqDYu7hTQXb%2Bkvrbu%2Fr3EXjiLjLvFIsQuDlxUSqXWZj7TRiLcLnmT%2BErjgjOr7dVRC%2FGB47IKYk0%3D

He says Bitcoin-qt doesn't allow him to sign with the coinbase address

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3ln77n/coinbases_from_feb_3_2009_just_moved_for_the/cv7pyra

At least in 0.11.0, that's not true. I just tried it and it worked fine.


I signed that on the same wallet.dat file that I used to mine the bitcoins -- I didn't import the private key or anything.

Could you please check if https://www.reddit.com/user/btcthwy is accessing reddit via Tor ?

Reddit mods don't have access to that info. (And I wouldn't publish that info anyway.)

wow one year of premine is bad...

Then how do you hand out IP ban on reddit ? You are the owner of /r/bitcoin and I guess, owners do have aceess to the IP log... no ?

But, I am not asking btcthwy identity to be revealed anyway. All I am asking is whether he is using Tor or not.

You can't.

Here, it seems, he is indicating you...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3ln77n/coinbases_from_feb_3_2009_just_moved_for_the/cv7pxzl

Is not it ? You have spoken to Satoshi many a times. Does /u/btcthwy response style matches with him ? I mean, do you get any resemblance ?

Put your tinfoil hat on ladies and gentleman. 
 
Got it?  Good. 
 
At some point in the future.... It could be 2018, or it could be 2025, the Satoshi Recovery False Flag is coming. 
 
This will be where the powers that be 'miraculously' recover the Satoshi million.  This will certainly happen well after Bitcoin goes mainstream and also right before things start to look very dire for the dollar. 
 
One of two scenarios will happen: 1.) a group of scientists and academics will claim to have uncovered the fortune of Satoshi, and will use it to bail out the federal government (given some stipulations of course).  2.) an abandoned computer facility will be 'found' (ala James Bond Skyfall Island) with the million Satishi coins.  The government will have a 'panel' determine what to do with them, and the answer will be to add them to the treasury and use them to back the U.S. Dollar. 
 
That's my guess.

If I know that person's other account, I don't know that I know it.

(I didn't enter the Bitcoin scene until a year after that person mined those bitcoins.)


I really don't think that Satoshi is government.

Oh I don't either. 
 
That would be disappointingly simple.

It was available to everyone from minute one. It just took an awful long time to convince anyone else to join in and you couldn't do that unless it was already operating. If you read the early scriptures Satoshi was very keen to get people on board.

Really... Try to think back and put yourself in 2008.  Shit was going down.  Stocks were collapsing.  News was going crazy with bank apocalypse talk.  Btw, most people still overwhelmingly got their news from the news - reddit was in its infancy and my daily net commute included CNN, Joystiq, and Digg.  Obama was elected, and that in itself was nuts.  Everyone was buzzing about this cool new Facebook thing.  Castle Crashers was coming out, which you could play online with your friends now that Xbox finally got its shit together.  
  
Look, point is... People had shit to do.  
  
And then some random mofo wants you to spend your computing cycles running some shady af digital money program?  It took a MASSIVE leap of faith and knowledge to buy into that, because it seemed like a silly nerd experiment at the time and there was no indication it would ever be any more than that.  
  
When theymos showed up a year after genesis and asked wtf was going on, Satoshi was probably just thrilled that some (anyone) was paying attention.  
  
Maybe you weren't there- I first encountered Bitcoin in 2012-ish and it *still* seemed shady af.  I'm one of the weirdest people I know and it was too "out there" for even me.  
  
My point is: there was no premine.  There was merely a period when this stuff was so alien and new that there was literally nothing you could say to convince most people to participate.  
  
"I have this neat new computer currency" - don't care.  
"It might change finance forever" - no it won't.  
"If you get into this now, you will be rich in a few years" -now you sound like a scammer.
  
Getting past whether satoshi's fortune is deserved, anyone who took the time to get into Bitcoin pre-2012 deserves a massive fortune.  And the ultra early adoption isn't even over yet.  In fact, we stand right now (in 2015) at a time when the success of crypto is more assured than ever and yet there are opportunities just as lucrative as early Bitcoin staring anyone in the face who bothers to pay attention.

What a lucky time to be alive.  
  
If you are reading my words now, in 2015, *you* are one of the lucky ones... There will be so many who won't get into crypto currency until it's built into their phone in the 2020's, but by then it won't make them rich.

By 2020 80%+ of all bitcoins will be mined. It would take 120 years to mine the rest. Hence, supply crunch will begin after 2020. Till then the channels for usage will be created. The magic will begin after 2020.

^^ your posts are always a great read. I agree with every single words, it is indeed a fantastic time to be alive. I pity the fact that I have only a little number of real life acquaintance I can share this excitement with  :-\

 

Thank you.   ;)
  
I saw a soccer mom on Facebook the other day talking about that MLM scam where women wrap themselves.... don't ask me; the latest bullshit going around after Herbalife.  Point is, she is desperately trying to earn some extra money for her family and thinks the best way to do that is to spam the shit out of her Facebook feed with this Wrap shit.  She's even bought a distribution kit from the company for $99 so she can call herself a 'business'.  
  
Holy hell man.  
  
So I IM'd her, and told her if she had spent that $99 on Bitcoin in 2010 that she would have the equivalent of about $200,000 now with no other work required.  I told her that money was about to change forever, and people who put in a little work now will be rich beyond reason in a decade.  I asked her she'd like to be the savior of her family, and the one who didn't bring in an extra few hundred a week - but actually changed her family line forever.  
  
She said she'd heard of bitcoin - that she thinks its some kind of digital money or something but she didn't know any more than that.  
  
So I linked her to Mr. Casares' excellent TED presentation and asked her to watch it: https://youtu.be/yPIvqJsCOSo and told her afterwards we could talk more about any questions she had.  
  
I've slowly reached out to my online and real life friends and the ratio is about 1 person who cares to 19 who don't.  But that's how things grow... laggards gonna lag.  And if there's anyone you shouldn't mind pitching cryptocurrency to it's these people who already show a predisposition to be brainwashed by this MLM shit - face it: cryptocurrency has speculatory aspects that mimic some parts of a MLM scheme, but diverge in that crypto can form the basis of a functioning economy while the money you pour into a pyramid scheme will always be worthless.  If they get interested in crypto then at least they'll be part of something genuine vs. flushing their money down the toilet of another pyramid company.  
  
You have to show people that not only does crypto have value, but also they can redistribute that value and wear it on their sleeve.  Someone needs to call up Jordan Belfort and tell him the hour of his great redemption has arrived.

Well, then a lot of people would probably regard those coins as lost forever, and I would guess the price of bitcoin would probably go up.

I dunno. Either they never move and it remains an eternal mystery with no real effect on the price because we can't know. Or they do move and the price shits itself even though they can only be sold once and Satoshi would probably prefer to eat his own buttocks than exchange them for the very thing he set out to usurp.

If I'd been Satoshi I would've kept them flowing around to avoid mythical status.

This is one of the things that caused me to realize that Bitcoin may succeed, but will not work as a worldwide currency.   
 
The fact that if Satoshi ever moved his coins (even a few of them), the entire Bitcoin universe will panic is absurd.  Obviously this isn't going to work on a global scale. 
 
Privacy is needed so that Satoshi would be able to own those coins and move/spend them whenever he likes without anyone knowing that one of the original miners was moving funds.

Satoshi has every rights to move or sell his own bitcoins. And we can strongly believe he will never ever sell all his coins at once. So, there is no clue to panic that price go bottom. Satoshi also will buy some coins if price go some what below from the current prices. Because current prices are just mining costs.

   
 
Do you doubt that the price would immediately nosedive if Satoshi sold any of his coins, regardless of whether its his right to do so? 
 
Every time one of the early miners sells any coins is always the same panic: "ZOMG IS SATOSHI SELLING COINS?" 
 
In a proper functioning currency, we shouldn't know if Satoshi buys or sells any coins.

Short term bitcoin price movement is very easy to cause. To make a 10% move in exchange rate happen as a flashcrash, only 0.02% of the coins need to be sold (or conversely bought). Satoshi coins' percentage is hundreds of times bigger - so selling some of them could collapse the price totally.

But, on the other hand, the rational response is to keep the previous marketcap [all - satoshi] equal to the new marketcap [all], which would mean that the price suffers less than 10% total when the dust has settled.

If you fear short term things and buy and sell based on rumors of them, on average you lose money. The factual significance of satoshi coins has become much less important in the last 1.5 years.

Satoshi was a genius and deserves to be rich.

Could you please back this statement with proper logic ?

- They represent less of the total supply than 1.5 yr before
- The time since Satoshi's disappearance is longer, and nothing has happened, giving markets more time to account them
- Bitcoin is older, proving that it is not dependent on Satoshi any more
- Market valuation is not in a bubble anymore - adding more supply suddenly would have turned the tide of events in the boomtime, now hardly
- They represent much less in dollar amount as well.

All of your statements make sense, except maybe the last since in the same way the total supply of Bitcoin is worth less in dollar amount just like Satoshi's chunk.

Still, 1.5M is a lot of coins and if these coins are to be moved, started being dumped or whatever else, we would see a real super earthquake that would last for a while.

I honestly think that Bitcoin is still not ready for this nor it is big enough to accumulate a move like this or the amount of coins.

To  rpietila's observations, I would add that Bitcoin has already seen an almost Satoshi-sized dumps of coins: USG auctioning off Ross Ulbricht's SR1 coins! He had commissions of something like 600k+ BTC and the US government announced it'd be auctioning off not just the SR1 hot wallet but also all the coins seized off his laptop, for a total of 173,991btc, or almost a fifth of the Satoshi estimates (!). The Bitcoin sky has not fallen.

I don't think it really matters what IP address he was using, nor if he was accessing reddit via tor (or some other IP masking service).

I can say with a fairly high level of confidence that whoever broadcast the transaction that spent the coinbase inputs is currently located in Australia, has connections to someone who is currently located in Australia, traded with someone that is currently located in Australia, or wanted to give the appearance of being currently located in Australia (I think this is unlikely because of how discrete he was about revealing his connection to Australia). I think the chances of none of the above being accurate are less then ~15% or so.

Well, said.
However, Satoshi did NOT want a lot of immediate/unwanted attention coming to Bitcoin.
So Satoshi was a bit cautious when advertising Bitcoin.

If he got all that BTC, he is so rich that he hardly can be an unknown person. At least around where he lives.

So we can look for millonaires to find satoshi  ;D