Satoshi's Fortune lower bound is 100M USD(DEBATE GOING ON, DO NOT TWEET!)

[Sergio_Demian_Lerner]

I've estimated a lower bound of current Satoshi's fortune. My estimation is that he owns more than 1M BTC, or 100M USD at current change.

It is impressive, isn't it?
That's a good reason to stay anonymous!

I've used the data from the blockchain in bootstrap.dat, so my estimation does not take into account the last 6 months.

I've assumed:

1. Satoshi mined almost alone from 1/3/2009 to 1/25/2010 (block 0 to block 36288). This assumption is based on the Total Network Strength
(Mhash/s) that was constant at 7 Mhash/s for this period of time. (check in https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?hl=en&key=0AmcTCtjBoRWUdHVRMHpqWUJValI1RlZiaEtCT1RrQmc&hl=en&gid=0)
If Satoshi mined alone the first 14 days, then he mined almost alone for the rest of the year.

2. I assume that boostrap.dat contains only the best chain (not orphan blocks)

3. I only take into account coinbase transactions.

4. I've assumed that if a coinbase output is spent, then none of the spent coins went back to Satoshi.

5. From the 1814400 BTC awarded, 1148800 BTC has never been spent (63%)

6. The BTC/USD exchange rate is 100 USB per BTC

If someone wants to check my computations, is welcomed because I used a special block chain parser made by myself.

Best regards, Sergio.

 

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[human]

Seems that Bitcoin is a premine scam if true.

I would like to know if any of those premined blocks where touched in front of major crashes. How can I find an answer for this question?

[Operatr]

Seems that Bitcoin is a premine scam if true.

I would like to know if any of those premined blocks where touched in front of major crashes. How can I find an answer for this question?

Satoshi him/themselves mined the first block themselves which is the Genesis Block, it was never "pre-mined" or started off with Bitcoin in the system already. Obviously at the very start of Bitcoin only a couple people were mining to begin with, and nothing to really do with the coins they generated until now.

[ElectricMucus]

How do you think you can tell it was satoshi only? What you have to know is that difficulty 1 is the minimum, it cannot go below that.
So if the network power was derived by the difficulty it would seem to be constant.

[human]

Seems that Bitcoin is a premine scam if true.

I would like to know if any of those premined blocks where touched in front of major crashes. How can I find an answer for this question?

Satoshi him/themselves mined the first block themselves which is the Genesis Block, it was never "pre-mined" or started off with Bitcoin in the system already. You have no clue what you're talking about friend

I said "if true". Can you please answer my question if you have a clue? How can I find out whether a significant amounth of coins of the first blocks where touched in front of major crashes?

[Sergio_Demian_Lerner]

Seems that Bitcoin is a premine scam if true.

I would like to know if any of those premined blocks where touched in front of major crashes. How can I find an answer for this question?

Satoshi him/themselves mined the first block themselves which is the Genesis Block, it was never "pre-mined" or started off with Bitcoin in the system already. You have no clue what you're talking about friend

I said "if true". Can you please answer my question if you have a clue? How can I find out whether a significant amounth of coins of the first blocks where touched in front of major crashes?

That is the next thing I was planing to do. But I´ll do it on monday....

[notig]

satoshi was so smart he had the forward thinking to generate a new private key address for each block he mined. Hence the reason there are 40+ thousand addresses with just 50 bitcoins in them. (Conjecture)

[k]

I've assumed:

1. Satoshi mined almost alone from 1/3/2009 to 1/25/2010 (block 0 to block 36288). This assumption is based on the Total Network Strength
(Mhash/s) that was constant at 7 Mhash/s for this period of time. (check in https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?hl=en&key=0AmcTCtjBoRWUdHVRMHpqWUJValI1RlZiaEtCT1RrQmc&hl=en&gid=0)
If Satoshi mined alone the first 14 days, then he mined almost alone for the rest of the year.

This assumption is at least partly wrong based on what Hal Finney says in this thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.msg1643833#msg1643833

When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away. I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin. I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction, when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test.

I assume Satoshi has many coins but I don't begrudge him any of them. He deserves them but I suspect he is not some one whose main motivation was to become rich.

Also my understanding is that the first block is un-spendable. I think I've read that Satoshi did this as he was the only person who could mine this block so it would be unfair if he could spend it but subsequent blocks were up for grabs by anyone who was mining (admittedly in practice probably only Satoshi and maybe Hal and some other very early adopters).

[Elwar]

The bottom feeders are going to come out of the woodwork to chastise the rich. How dare he create a revolutionary new currency and benefit from it.

How dare he combine risk, work and thought for reward. Such a thing is unheard of. He should have earned it through favor and force.

[Elwar]

or by war and destruction like American bastards in Iraq, and not only there.

Like I said...force.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Some flaws with the analysis.

1) Difficulty couldn't go below 1 & the "network" has no idea what the hashing power is.  We can only guesstimate the hashing power based on the time between blocks.  If you look at the period of time between blocks in the first year you will notice there is variance.  Variance can either be natural variance from the mining process or changes in hashing power.    It is simply a false statement to claim the hashrate was a constant 7 MH/s.  There is no way to prove that is true and it arguably never was.  The spreadsheet is merely a guesstimate at an aproximate hashrate based on the average time between blocks of the preceding period and is subject to error like any hashrate estimate (i.e the times between blocks was X and since the AVERAGE block requires 4.2 billion hashes the hashrate would need to be ~y to solve block at this rate ON AVERAGE).

2) There is no evidence that Satoshi mined alone the entire time.  Hal Finney reports mining early (in the first 100 or so blocks) and there are other reports of people mining on and off during the early mailing list days.

When Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, he got a skeptical reception at best. Cryptographers have seen too many grand schemes by clueless noobs. They tend to have a knee jerk reaction.

I was more positive. I had long been interested in cryptographic payment schemes. Plus I was lucky enough to meet and extensively correspond with both Wei Dai and Nick Szabo, generally acknowledged to have created ideas that would be realized with Bitcoin. I had made an attempt to create my own proof of work based currency, called RPOW. So I found Bitcoin facinating.

When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away. I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin. I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction, when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test. I carried on an email conversation with Satoshi over the next few days, mostly me reporting bugs and him fixing them.

3) The early client "mined" automatically in the background when running.  For Satoshi to have mined all the blocks for the first year that would mean nobody, not a single person ever downloaded the client which is simply false.

On edit:
4) The first 2016 block interval took 28 days and the next 7 took on average 17 days (with a deviation of only +/- 1 day).  This strongly suggests interest significantly increased after the first week.  One could conclude that the first week was Satoshi alone but I don't think that is likely either.  By May hashing power had fallen significantly  with the 2016 timeframe rising from ~17 days to 28 and then up to a peak of 42.  While there is some variance due to the nature of difficulty to think that Satoshi was the sole miner one would have to think that when the network was at its slowest Satoshi intentionally reduced his own hashing power to roughly half of that in the earlier weeks.   

[deepceleron]

I've assumed:

1. Satoshi mined almost alone from 1/3/2009 to 1/25/2010 (block 0 to block 36288). This assumption is based on the Total Network Strength

That is an incorrect assumption, remember the default behaviour of Bitcoin was to generate coins with just one checkbox in the options menu. You will find there are many people trying out Bitcoin, and before this forum opened, there was about six months of (lost) chit chat on a sourceforge forum too, so it's hard to examine records of people trying it out (or leaving it running):

2009-06-13 06:41

The new Bitcoin website/portal is up at bitcoin.sourceforge.net.  
Forums and a wiki are included, so you're welcome to join discussion  
and wiki documentation.

Martti Malmi
Bitcoin Web Developer


From here...

We had our first automatic adjustment of the proof-of-work difficulty on 30 Dec 2009.  

I have noticed some slowdown since the adjustment, but I still generate a lot of coins.

When Generating, the user will gain 50 coins after creating 120 blocks. Why..

I haven't really been able to tell if coins generate slower or not with less connections...

My first transaction completed resulting in +50 Coins. Yay!!

But what is true is that anybody running Bitcoin that year with a consumer Core 2 would make about 2000 BTC a day.
[Bounty] 201600 BTC for a time machine, I only need a few hours...

[deepceleron]

Mining was not constant either during 2009, it's up to you to figure out how much is Satoshi:

[DeathAndTaxes]

To assist in deepceleron chart.   

To find a block at difficulty 1 requires an average of 2^32 hashes.  So 50 blocks per day = ( 50 * 2^32) / (60 * 60 * 24 * 1000^2) = 2.485 MH/s

 50 blocks per day = ~2.5 MH/s
100 blocks per day = ~5.0 MH/s
144 blocks per day = ~7.2 MH/s
150 blocks per day = ~7.5 MH/s
200 blocks per day = ~9.9 MH/s

[tacotime]

One thing to note about the blocks from genesis to 30,000 or so is that
a) They, for the most part, all appear to have different coinbase transactions.
b) They are also almost completely unspent.

I think the likeliest scenario is that hundreds of people downloaded and ran the client then, got a bunch of blocks that were at the time useless because they were valueless, then deleted their clients.  Recall that in May 2010, bitcoins were only trading for 0.0025 USD each.  It's my personal guess that these coins are just lost to the chain forever.

[wolverine.ks]

would you pay extra for one of the very first btc's ever mined?

[Bitobsessed]

would you pay extra for one of the very first btc's ever mined?

I would pay BTC1 for BTC1 from the genesis block.

[Sergio_Demian_Lerner]

Some flaws with the analysis.

1) Difficulty couldn't go below 1 & the "network" has no idea what the hashing power is.  We can only guesstimate the hashing power based on the time between blocks.  If you look at the period of time between blocks in the first year you will notice there is variance.  Variance can either be natural variance from the mining process or changes in hashing power.    It is simply a false statement to claim the hashrate was a constant 7 MH/s.  There is no way to prove that is true and it arguably never was.  The spreadsheet is merely a guesstimate at an aproximate hashrate based on the average time between blocks of the preceding period and is subject to error like any hashrate estimate (i.e the times between blocks was X and since the AVERAGE block requires 4.2 billion hashes the hashrate would need to be ~y to solve block at this rate ON AVERAGE).

But a single computer in 2009 could do 2^32 hashes in 10 minutes. So if we assume that Satoshi PC was all time powered on mining, then we MUST accept that almost all the coins were generated by him. Why would Satoshi turn off his PC if he foresaw the future?
The average number of zeros in block hashes in that range is 33, not more. The average number of zeros in the first 30 blocks is 32.8.
We must accept that during the first two hours he was mining alone!

Therefore there was, at average, a single or maybe two PC  mining (but rarely) until block 36288.

So your argument is flawed

Please try to refute this argument!

2) There is no evidence that Satoshi mined alone the entire time.  Hal Finney reports mining early (in the first 100 or so blocks) and there are other reports of people mining on and off during the early mailing list days.

My prior argument says exactly that: IF he was continuously mining, then he was mining almost alone.

When Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography....I mined block 70-something...

Everybody read that Hal mined the block 70-something, which means that he mined very little, as most of the people in that time interval.

3) The early client "mined" automatically in the background when running.  For Satoshi to have mined all the blocks for the first year that would mean nobody, not a single person ever downloaded the client which is simply false.

People downloaded the software, mined a few blocks, and dumped it. Almost everybody except for Satoshi.

So again, IF he was mining continuously in that interval, then he has at least 500k BTC now, with independence if somebody else was mining or not.

[noedaRDH]

And what if Satoshi started passing out free BTC's to people? There was some dude doing that on redit a few days ago. Could be Satoshi (or the group known as Satoshi).

[gmaxwell]

1. Satoshi mined almost alone from 1/3/2009 to 1/25/2010 (block 0 to block 36288).

He did not. I mined during that time— so did many other people I've talked to. As you're probably aware the original software mined _very_ slowly, and contemporary hardware was slow. Heck even a fairly current machine with state of the art software can just barely do enough hashrate for difficulty 1. (and god, before more handout requests come: Bitcoin was worthless then, the software was annoying windows-gui only— I ran it in wine+vncserver, and I didn't keep my original wallet)

Its nice when bad arguments are so easily falsified.

I would pay BTC1 for BTC1 from the genesis block.

The coins created by the genesis block are forever unspendable.