A lot of time an energy as been devoted to Satoshi potential fortune of
UNSPENT coins (granted could me more than 1 million!), but I decided to take a harder look at the coins Satoshi just MIGHT have spent to see what they can tell us.
The article's author below reproduces Sergio Demian Lerner's blockchain analysis with the intent to infer LIKELY Satoshi mined coins using two main observations/patterns: 1) Coinbase Transaction's Extra Nonce pattern and 2) the block's own Nonce range pattern. Both observations reinforce and refine his initial thesis. Yes, neither technique is absolutely definitive so by combining the two strategies reduces, but not eliminates, the amount of false positives. For more background the article provides a decent summary of Sergio's analysis, but it is even better to hear it directly from Sergio's own blog where he has
plenty of related articles on bitcoin Chain Archaeology here:
https://bitslog.com/category/uncategorized/ At the end of the article, and without much ado, the author provides a list of 19 blocks he believes were
mined by Satoshi:
The Satoshi Fortune https://medium.com/@whale_alert/the-satoshi-fortune-e49cf73f9a9bNote: according to our research the following blocks have been mined and spent by Satoshi: 9, 286, 688, 877, 1760, 2459, 2485, 3479, 5326, 9443, 9925, 10645, 14450, 15625, 15817, 19093, 23014, 28593 and 29097.
Presumably the author concludes these are Satoshi mined blocks based on blocks matching the distinct Extra Nonce pattern w/ its coinbase transaction AND having the last byte of the block's nonce fall within a specific relatively narrow range. However even if they two 'tells' are legit there is always a possibility of a false positive by shear coincidence.
Keep in your mind this article
estimates Satoshi mined over 1.1 MILLION coins, but that is
not what this thread is about.
Instead I decided to take this small list of
SPENT coin blocks (article feel confident they identified a total of
907 coins spent by Satoshi
) and put them to the test building upon a keen observation made by
Taras back in his 2017 thread
Payment No. 1: A Closer Look at the Very First Bitcoin Transfer https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2346992.0 (excellent background read!)I analyzed the 19 spent transactions and found
4 more followed Taras' initial observation! That is when you send bitcoins the early implementation of the bitcoin wallet simply grabbed the first coins available
based on coinbase's transaction hash ORDER! (in other words NO option to specify which coins you wanted to spend it selected it for you using the transaction hash order)
Here is the breakdown order by transaction hash for each of the 5 starting with well documented first transaction EVER made between CONFIRMED Satoshi and Hal (reflecting Taras' findings) from Block 9:
The first version of the bitcoin wallet chose which coins were to be spent in a transaction based on the transaction ID the coins came from (actually by how many there are first, but in this case, all the transactions mined precisely 50 BTC, so that doesn't make a difference). The first payment to Hal Finney was in block 170, and newly mined bitcoins can only be spent after they have 101 confirmations, so only coins up to block 68 were spendable when the first payment happened.
Block 286: this suspected satoshi spender just happen to use the SECOND out of 423 blocks in TX hash order:
This image shows how first block with lowest transaction hash order (278) does
NOT conform to either the Satoshi extra nonce pattern NOR the block's nonce pattern supporting that Satoshi spent
his 'first available block' theory:
Block 688: yet again this suspected Satoshi spender just happen to have the
lowest transaction hash order block available to spend out of 2,653 potential blocks:
Block 5326: and yet again this suspected Satoshi spender (matching both patterns) just happen to have the
lowest transaction hash order block available to spend out of 11,307 potential blocks:
continued...