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

[Sergio_Demian_Lerner]

PS I never suggested Satoshi didn't mine block 1.  Personally I think he probably did maybe even a significant fraction of the first 2016 as hashing power during that period of time was much lower then subsequent blocks.

I have strong evidence the same computer AND JUST ONE  mined blocks 1-10
(edit: or a group of computers turned on exactly at the same time)

Just look at the extra nonce in the coinbase field of the coinbase transaction.

The counter is monotonically incrementing at a constant pace.

Also this can be used to find how many computers/threads where mining at  some  time (until they get powered-off). Each thread has another monotonically incrementing ExtraNonce variable.

So from that we can infer Satoshi PC Resources. Those resources allowed him to mine a block with 32 leading zeros every 6 minutes.

[gmaxwell]

So from that we can infer Satoshi PC Resources. Those resources allowed him to mine a block with 32 leading zeros every 6 minutes.

The behavior of the chain proves that that much computing power was not being applied to mining in the first year, otherwise the difficulty would have become 1.66 when it couldn't actually sustain 1. I continue to be impressed at how much you insist on the hysterical speculations and conclusions rather that just going and measuring the speed of the old openssl sha256 as I had.

[oakpacific]

So from that we can infer Satoshi PC Resources. Those resources allowed him to mine a block with 32 leading zeros every 6 minutes.

The behavior of the chain proves that that much computing power was not being applied to mining in the first year, otherwise the difficulty would have become 1.66 when it couldn't actually sustain 1. I continue to be impressed at how much you insist on the hysterical speculations and conclusions rather that just going and measuring the speed of the old openssl sha256 as I had.

Seems that he didn't even dare to respond to your previous comment.

[MarKusRomanus]

And if bitcoin had failed, like most people thought it would.. none of this would even matter.

[beckspace]

I think satoshi could have tried to get everyone to mine, but no one would have believed him, if you look at the initial reaction in the posts in his cryto group a lot of them said nah don't think so

so it was not really a premine in that sense just no one knew or wanted to mine!!!

Bitcoin is such an alien design that even in the crypto group it was initially bashed?

I mean, how to introduce a new concept in the world (cryptocurrencies) if even between your own peers it is not well promptly understood?

Releasing 50 coins every 10 minutes doesn't sound like just a good idea, but also the only idea that would work.

And if bitcoin had failed, like most people thought it would.. none of this would even matter.

True.

[mrb]

I've assumed:
1. Satoshi mined almost alone from 1/3/2009 to 1/25/2010 (block 0 to block 36288).

A user, maria2.0, has proven she owns the private key of block 9455 (mined on 2009-04-01) by signing a message: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=164569.0

And she claims to own "3.5 million coins between satoshi and her" (although that is probably false or an exxageration IMHO).

[Etlase2]

I believe that Satoshi foresaw this very issue, and so avoided mining at all until well after the public announcement (if ever). Blocks 1-100+ were, I suspect, not mined by Satoshi.

el oh el

[deepceleron]

I have strong evidence the same computer AND JUST ONE  mined blocks 1-10

Just look at the extra nonce in the coinbase field of the coinbase transaction.

The counter is monotonically incrementing at a constant pace.

Also this can be used to find how many computers/threads where mining at  some  time (until they get powered-off). Each thread has another monotonically incrementing ExtraNonce variable.

So from that we can infer Satoshi PC Resources. Those resources allowed him to mine a block with 32 leading zeros every 6 minutes.

It is strong evidence that one entity mined those blocks. Mining timestamps start three hours after the announcement email dropped in the inbox of every crypto mailing list subscriber.

It would be cool if coinbase scriptsig + nonce could act as a counter of exactly how many hashes an individual miner has been doing, but analysis doesn't allow perfect inference of the hashrate. The bnExtraNonce (which is an OpenSSL bn BigNum being written in hex) starts at 1 every instantiation and is incremented whenever the miner loop is restarted which is:

-if the miner thread is restarted (through UI, restart),
-after every 262144 hashes:

• if new transactions have been seen and miner has ran for more than 60 seconds,
• if there is a new network block or a block is found
• if the nonce has wrapped to 0

One still could dump nonce+extra and attempt to assemble a tree of likely continuous miner runs, although analysis code might get confused pretty quickly.

One interesting thing in my reading of 0.1.0 is that mining won't start if Bitcoin is not connected to other nodes, so there had to be at least two Bitcoin machines on. This is probably to prevent naive forking, from miners reconnecting with a longer chain. In fact, I found that bitcoin would crash if it can't get to IRC. It also determines external IP addresses using two web services by static IPs that are dead, only one of which is still alive by DNS, so this makes testnetting harder since you have to emulate these. On the plus side, it writes the genesis block itself if blk0001 doesn't exist (which I find out after manually dumping and importing block 0 into another Bitcoin).

Also it looks like a good CPU would be lucky to get ~0.5MHash - the miner is single-threaded, and it calls the Crypto++ library to do SHA256 and byte juggling twice for every hash.

BTW all this crap about 32 hash bits etc is irrelevant. When did Sergio go batshit?

[Sergio_Demian_Lerner]

Ok, I give up.  

I like deepceleron response, at least it´s based on facts about the code rather than on people remembrances.

But still, what people say contradicts the blockchain:

The first release of Satoshi client v0.1 was on Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:05:49 -0800

(http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10142.html)


That was AFTER block 1 to 10 were mined. So, that´s another evidence that he mined blocks 1-10 himself, which means he HAD the computer power or he was extremely lucky.
(unless I made a mistake with converting time zones, but I don´t think so)

[ElectricMucus]

Ok, I give up. 

I like deepceleron response, at least it´s based on facts about the code rather than on people remembrances.

But still, what people say contradicts the blockchain:

The first release of Satoshi client v0.1 was on Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:05:49 -0800

(http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10142.html)


That was AFTER block 1 to 10 were mined. So, that´s another evidence that he mined blocks 1-10 himself, which means he HAD to computer power or he was extremely lucky.
(unless I made a mistake with converting time zones, but I don´t think so)

Don't give up, just make more coherent arguments and write that up in a blog post or write a paper on it.
The whole thing in forum posts is very difficult to follow.

[Sergio_Demian_Lerner]

Please, I´m not saying that all the people could mine at 8 Mhashes/sec (32-bits/10 minutes).
If that were the case, then the difficulty would have increased when other people started mining, as someone pointed out.

I´m saying that SATOSHI had the resources to do it. Maybe he borrowed them, or he used the network of someone else. Or he had a simple GPU miner.
Or SATOSHI is a group of 16 people, each one with his own computer, all mining right from the start.

Thank you ElectricMucus by your support.

[deepceleron]

Date from the raw email @ mailing list:

From satoshi at vistomail.com  Thu Jan  8 14:27:40 2009
From: satoshi at vistomail.com (Satoshi Nakamoto)
Date: Fri, 09 Jan 2009 03:27:40 +0800
Subject: Bitcoin v0.1 released
Message-ID: <CHILKAT-MID-3d087dc8-b531-1fd3-bebb-15dcffb225ce@server123>

Announcing the first release of Bitcoin, a new electronic cash
system that uses a peer-to-peer network to prevent double-spending.
It's completely decentralized with no server or central authority.

Note that the Jan 09 time above is UTC +8, it's Satoshi (pretending to be) in Asia or Western Australia.

Block 1 timestamp: 1231469665 Fri: 09 Jan 2009 02:54:25 GMT

At block 73, someone's miner gets a restart or a new player starts mining for several blocks

coinbase":"04ffff001d0101"
Sat, 10 Jan 2009 23:31:28 GMT

[zemario]

Gee... people get high on the word "Satoshi". Picking a japanese alias was pure geniality. Just imagine the amount of mysticism and absurd esoteric conspiracy theories that would be doomed if the guy would pick "Joe Average" instead of "Satoshi nakamoto".

The genesis block was public from day one, yet these conspiracy theories about Satoshi pre-mining keep popping up.
It's quite entertaining to see this kind of discussion now that bitcoin is getting really big. Why didn't you rush to mine back then? I tell you what, pay a couple of hundred bucks to some mediocre developer and have him fork the bitcoin client and change the genesis hash. Then you can have your own crypto currency and per-mine all you want. Then go figure why nobody really gives a sh*t about it.

Satoshi used to post on this forum, go and read his posts, they are mostly about technical issues with bitcoin protocol and client. Satoshi is clearly a brilliant developer/engineer if his main goal was to become a millionaire he would already be one long before bitcoin.

Sadly many people in this forum cannot understand any motivation beyond getting rich. I both despise and pity you.
But hey, this is just a rant of mine, you're always free to discuss whatever matter you find relevant of course. Can be 'a bit' pointless though.

[Sergio_Demian_Lerner]

Date from the raw email @ mailing list:

From satoshi at vistomail.com  Thu Jan  8 14:27:40 2009
From: satoshi at vistomail.com (Satoshi Nakamoto)
Date: Fri, 09 Jan 2009 03:27:40 +0800
Subject: Bitcoin v0.1 released
Message-ID: <CHILKAT-MID-3d087dc8-b531-1fd3-bebb-15dcffb225ce@server123>

Announcing the first release of Bitcoin, a new electronic cash
system that uses a peer-to-peer network to prevent double-spending.
It's completely decentralized with no server or central authority.

Note that the Jan 09 time above is UTC +8, it's Satoshi (pretending to be) in Asia or Western Australia.

Block 1 timestamp: 1231469665 Fri: 09 Jan 2009 02:54:25 GMT

At block 73, someone's miner gets a restart or a new player starts mining for several blocks

coinbase":"04ffff001d0101"
Sat, 10 Jan 2009 23:31:28 GMT

Does that mean that the message was sent before Block 1 was mined?

[Sergio_Demian_Lerner]

Sadly many people in this forum cannot understand any motivation beyond getting rich. I both despise and pity you.

Gmaxwell and DeathAndTaxes have many BTC. They are here from long ago.

They may don't like that the idea that Satoshi is rich because that news threatens the arrival of new Bitcoin owners, which in turn increases the monetary value of the Bitcoin.

The idea of a poor hero is stronger than a multi-millionarie hero, and helps diluting  the idea of the evil: a giant Ponci scheme! 

Maybe most people here in the forums (like GMax and Death), without saying sit, would prefer Satoshi not to be a millionarie.

I think everybody wants to be rich. Even to do exactly what you do, but without bothering on getting paid. I think there is nothing morally wrong on being rich.

So I understand why Gmaxwell and DeathAndTaxes and now zemario responded so emotionally to this thread.

But since I have not a single BTC, nor any other virtual coin, I have nothing to loose, nor anything to win.

Everything I do here, I do it because I like to. Not because of money, not to become rich.

Satoshi is a genius, but I seek the true story of him..
 

[Peter Todd]

BTW all this crap about 32 hash bits etc is irrelevant. When did Sergio go batshit?

Ran out of security holes to find I guess.

[Sergio_Demian_Lerner]

BTW all this crap about 32 hash bits etc is irrelevant. When did Sergio go batshit?

Ran out of security holes to find I guess.

LOL, yes. I now only monitor and audit code changes, not the full code.

[Zomdifros]

You know what would be the coolest thing on earth?

This is from the Bitcoin 2013 conference:

Friday, May 17: Schedule
4:00pm - 7:00pm: Mark Edge and Ian Freeman from Free Talk Live will be broadcasting live from the convention center.  Come early and watch their broadcast!
7:00pm: Registration will officially open
7:00pm - 9:00pm: Exhibits will be open   
8:00pm: Introductions and keynote speaker (TBA)

What if that keynote speaker happened to be non other than...

Ah forget, I'm just dreaming 

[AlphaWolf]

3. I'm mistaken. How?

The original software is far slower than you give it credit for... I benchmarked old openssl code on a contemporary P3 a while back and got about 47KH/s as I vaguely recall. Why don't you go test it instead of making guesses from comments.

I would also not assume that the timestamps on the pre-public blocks are accurate— all we really know for sure was that there were at least two blocks created between 03/Jan/2009 and 11/Jan/2009. Rounding that down to 7 days suggests a lower bound hashrate of 14 KH/s.  Even if Satoshi had more computing power he might have simply been borrowing it for testing.

I'm with you that the OP is off on his assessment... but in what way was a P3 "contemporary" to any period of Bitcoin's history?  I have a stock 3.2 GHz P4 purchased from Dell in 2005.  Prescott core, so a "later" model P4.  It can do > 1000KH/s, and it was already obsolete by the time Bitcoin came around four years later.  Hell, the Core 2 Quad Q9550 came out in Q1 of 2008, and it easily gets well over 10 MH/s.  I'll grant you that the old client was poorly optimized, etc...  But P3's were long obsolete even by 2009 standards, so it's rather misleading to claim those results as "contemporary".

[Etlase2]

I'm with you that the OP is off on his assessment... but in what way was a P3 "contemporary" to any period of Bitcoin's history?  I have a stock 3.2 GHz P4 purchased from Dell in 2005.  Prescott core, so a "later" model P4.  It can do > 1000KH/s, and it was already obsolete by the time Bitcoin came around four years later.  Hell, the Core 2 Quad Q9550 came out in Q1 of 2008, and it easily gets well over 10 MH/s.  I'll grant you that the old client was poorly optimized, etc...  But P3's were long obsolete even by 2009 standards, so it's rather misleading to claim those results as "contemporary".

Sergio's post at the end of page 3 hit the nail on the head. Gmax and D&T have a massive horse in this race and are in no way objective about this. He (gmaxwell) is using the same argument he used with me some 2 years ago in IRC. "ohh but the but the processors were so slow in 2009 there's no way it was just satoshi" even though the facts pretty much fly in the face of this. It's not like that crypto mailing list is very active. The bitcoin release had what, 15-20 replies from about 5 different people? Difficulty of 1 is 7MH/s and the average power between blocks 1-32k was less than 7MH/s because the avg. block time was 13 minutes or so. The block time is fairly consistent from the beginning of that period to the end, indicating that about the same number of people who mined bitcoin from the start were the same group mining until a few more started coming on in around blocks 32-36k.

Arguing that satoshi had a lower bound hashrate of 14kh/s in 2009 based on the first two or three blocks? Incredibly naive for someone who has a deep understanding of bitcoin. I'd argue the intent of that post is entirely to deceive.