historical blk00000 coinbase analysis: is ~1.7 M bitcoins likely lost?

[PrimeNumber7]

well the best hole i can poke into this theory is going to be based on hashrate. there is a very low chance that only a single CPU could have generate that much hashrate to mine all those blocks, there must have been more than 1 individual and separate CPUs mining at the same time to increase the luck of finding blocks at that rate. there were no pool mining and the bitcoin client at that time didn't have the commands required for it either (hence the separate CPUs).

There is no reason why a single person wouldn’t be able to use two (or more) computers to mine on. Similarly, there is no reason why someone wouldn’t have been able to spin up a bunch of AWS VPSs to mine on.

I would also not assume that GPUs were not used in bitcoin’s early days. The cost to execute a double spend attack in early 2009 would have been very low, and if someone who discovered bitcoin was screwing around successfully executed some variant of a 51% attack, bitcoin would have been quickly derailed. Figuring out how to mine via GPUs while suggesting others to use CPUs would be a cost efficient way to guard against this from happening. The above is why I believe satoshi was behind a lot of bitcoins early blocks and mining.

[pooya87]

I would also not assume that GPUs were not used in bitcoin’s early days. The cost to execute a double spend attack in early 2009 would have been very low, and if someone who discovered bitcoin was screwing around successfully executed some variant of a 51% attack, bitcoin would have been quickly derailed. Figuring out how to mine via GPUs while suggesting others to use CPUs would be a cost efficient way to guard against this from happening. The above is why I believe satoshi was behind a lot of bitcoins early blocks and mining.

while it is not impossible you are simplifying the process a lot. creating a GPU miner for bitcoin was not as easy as you would think. it takes a lot of time to write the code correctly and in a way that it actually becomes faster. it was not like today where you can just jump to some server and find dozens of libraries that help you do it easily. and you have to look at the bigger picture, Satoshi created bitcoin which has dozens of more important parts to be concerned about than writing a GPU miner. not to mention that if you look at how long it took for the first GPU miner to be created you can see how hard it actually was.

[PrimeNumber7]

I would also not assume that GPUs were not used in bitcoin’s early days. The cost to execute a double spend attack in early 2009 would have been very low, and if someone who discovered bitcoin was screwing around successfully executed some variant of a 51% attack, bitcoin would have been quickly derailed. Figuring out how to mine via GPUs while suggesting others to use CPUs would be a cost efficient way to guard against this from happening. The above is why I believe satoshi was behind a lot of bitcoins early blocks and mining.

while it is not impossible you are simplifying the process a lot. creating a GPU miner for bitcoin was not as easy as you would think. it takes a lot of time to write the code correctly and in a way that it actually becomes faster. it was not like today where you can just jump to some server and find dozens of libraries that help you do it easily. and you have to look at the bigger picture, Satoshi created bitcoin which has dozens of more important parts to be concerned about than writing a GPU miner. not to mention that if you look at how long it took for the first GPU miner to be created you can see how hard it actually was.

My assumption is satoshi was using GPU(s) to mine in bitcoin's early days. Keep in mind that he has ~unlimited time to create code to create a GPU minder as he controlled the timing of when the first bitcoin client was released.

[Kakmakr]

I am continuing to explore the early bitcoin blockchain using blk00000.dat covering 2009-01-03 to 2011-04-24 time period.

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• 1) extracted 119,965 coinbase transactions from blk00000.dat each mining 50 bitcoins using a single output address (only 73 had multiple so I ignored them for these calculations) using pyblockchain's BlockchainFileReader

Ok, stupid question... You are saying you are looking at 119,965 Coinbase transactions (covering 2009-01-03 to 2011-04-24) but Coinbase was only established in July 2011. 

Coinbase has it's own internal database, so I reckon you are not looking at that, but rather data provided by them from the Bitcoin BTC Blockchain for that period?

Can you post a link to your source data please?

  Thanks for taking the time to read the thread! 

Do you mean Coinbase the company founded in June 2012?  If so I was confused about the same thing.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Coinbase_(business)

Coinbase, the company, was named after a bitcoin coinbase transaction:

Coinbase
The coinbase is the content of the 'input' of a generation transaction. While regular transactions use the 'inputs' section to refer to their parent transaction outputs, a generation transaction has no parent, and creates new coins from nothing.
The coinbase can contain any arbitrary data. The genesis block famously contains the dated title of a newspaper article in The Times:
The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

From<https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Coinbase>

Here is the genesis coinbase block transaction for example: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/4a5e1e4baab89f3a32518a88c31bc87f618f76673e2cc77ab2127b7afdeda33b

I got my data from extracting these coinbase transactions out of a copy of the first bitcoin blockchain data file (blk00000.dat)

Well, it shows you... we are never too old to learn something new.    Thank you for clearing this up... and yea, I was referring to the company, called Coinbase. 

Also thank you for the source data, it gives me something new to explore and something new to learn. Just a side note, I have several coin on Paper wallets ...that are stored for many years now... so that does not mean that they are lost, because there are no movement. (I did not even extract the forked coins from these wallets, because I do not want to risk it)

[DougM]

Also thank you for the source data, it gives me something new to explore and something new to learn. Just a side note, I have several coin on Paper wallets ...that are stored for many years now... so that does not mean that they are lost, because there are no movement. (I did not even extract the forked coins from these wallets, because I do not want to risk it)

Congrats on being an early miner!  When did you first start mine? If do you recall the blocks you mined if pre 50,000 (i.e., before May 2010)?
Unless you are running a bitcoin node and have them already, you will have to download the blk*.dat files to analyze.  Since I was interested in exploring the earliest I focused on blk0000.dat.  While likely you can obtain these files from a number of sources, I successfully downloaded the first 5 files from here:
https://github.com/garethjns/PyBC/tree/master/pybit/Blocks
 It all depends on what you want to 'explore'. My objective was to learn Python using large data sets so I decided to explore bitcoin's blockchain.
There are a number of blockchain parsers available. Since I am learning python (using free opensource IDE Spyder) I tried a few python parsers especially those that exposed enough of the details so I could get my hands dirty.  I then loaded a subset of the extracted data in SQLLite (free opensource) database for analysis. Good luck with your exploration!