Did the MysteryMiner (MM) keep his coins?

[molecular]

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, I noticed a weird spike of "non-moved coins" in calendar week 9 of year 2011:

like this? even 0.01 BTC help continue cool queries/charts: 1SQL2R5ijCn2ZiBG8aDYpCiecNPuxzMJJ

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

[Remember remember the 5th of November]

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

[molecular]

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?

[Remember remember the 5th of November]

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.

[Jack of Diamonds]

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)

[Graet]

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

[molecular]

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.

[John Tobey]

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!

[Raize]

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.

[molecular]

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.

[ElectricMucus]

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.).

+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.  

[MysteryMiner]

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...

[Confucius]

DDoS, packers/crypters, proxy servers and other stuff for bitcoins. PM me!
Send some of your bitcoins to me now before I do it myself! 1Aiq9FYv12GQjM9LeBHoNq9c3FfFaA4GTA

Nice Signature.

[DeathAndTaxes]

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

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.

[MysteryMiner]

DDoS, packers/crypters, proxy servers and other stuff for bitcoins. PM me!
Send some of your bitcoins to me now before I do it myself! 1Aiq9FYv12GQjM9LeBHoNq9c3FfFaA4GTA

Nice Signature.

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.

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.

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.

[Raize]

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.

[sadpandatech]

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

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.

 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.





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

[Confucius]

DDoS, packers/crypters, proxy servers and other stuff for bitcoins. PM me!
Send some of your bitcoins to me now before I do it myself! 1Aiq9FYv12GQjM9LeBHoNq9c3FfFaA4GTA

Nice Signature.

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.

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)?

[finway]

I think he's the first GPU miner.

[molecular]

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

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.

 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.



Awesome, where did you get (the data for) that?




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