Block 14 to Block 15 - 24 hour dark zone?

[bitcoinhistorian]

Hey everyone,

I have been researching block numbers and the day/time they reside on but have come across something I don't understand and wanted to get some second opinions,

Block 14 day & timestamp is  - https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/blocks/btc/14

But from what I can see the next block happens 24 hours later with nothing in between leading to block 15

Block 15 day & timestamp is  - https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/blocks/btc/15

Does anyone have any clarity on this?

[1714327167]

1714327167

[1714327167]

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[1714327167]

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[LoyceV]

Have you seen time.txt yet? It happened more often:

Code:

14,2009-01-09 04:33:09
15,2009-01-10 04:45:46

27,2009-01-10 06:56:13
28,2009-01-10 15:30:57

168,2009-01-11 23:39:41
169,2009-01-12 03:22:03

My guess: Satoshi just turned off his Bitcoin node (or his entire PC) for some reason. It wasn't that important to keep running back then, and there were not thousands of other miners like now.

[DaveF]

Yes, he was probably doing a lot of testing / debugging back then. And it just would have been easier to shutdown, code, compile, start it up again and test.
Makes you wonder how many proto-genesis blocks are out there as he went 'whoops that didn't work' lets try this.
We know what is on the Linux discussion lists and such, but not what he played around with that just never saw the light of day or was even discussed.

-Dave

[ranochigo]

You can model the timezone of Satoshi if you were to analyze the code commits, forum posting patterns among other things and you'll realize that Satoshi mostly follows a specific sleep schedule. A possibility could be Satoshi turned off their miner as LoyceV has said but it could also be that his PC is just that slow and unstable to find a block. CPU miners were fairly unstable and slow, even for 1 difficulty blocks especially how optimized it was.

Regardless, the nonce of the block is pretty special and follows a specific pattern. Jlopp has a nice writeup here: https://blog.lopp.net/was-satoshi-a-greedy-miner/

[logfiles]

Have you seen time.txt yet? It happened more often:

Code:

14,2009-01-09 04:33:09
15,2009-01-10 04:45:46

27,2009-01-10 06:56:13
28,2009-01-10 15:30:57

168,2009-01-11 23:39:41
169,2009-01-12 03:22:03

My guess: Satoshi just turned off his Bitcoin node (or his entire PC) for some reason. It wasn't that important to keep running back then, and there were not thousands of other miners like now.

Aren't those also considered the times when there was a downtime on the Bitcoin network?

Looking at these two sites;
1. https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/
2. https://bitcoinuptime.org/

The only consider two dates
1. Date:August 15, 2010 Block:74,638
2. Date:August,2013 (date not even disclosed) Block:252,450

[ranochigo]

Aren't those also considered the times when there was a downtime on the Bitcoin network?

Looking at these two sites;
1. https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/
2. https://bitcoinuptime.org/

The only consider two dates
1. Date:August 15, 2010 Block:74,638
2. Date:August,2013 (date not even disclosed) Block:252,450

It isn't downtime. The network was fully functional and if you were to run a miner at that point in time, you would probably get a block with relative ease. Those downtime that was mentioned on the site has to do with the fork that occurred after the two events; overflow of transaction amount and the unintentional fork. Those were times whereby it would be unsafe to make any transactions.

[crwth]

Definitely a great trivia question or something for this one, but we cannot confirm if it's the node of Satoshi being turned off for a while or something.

I'm thinking about this with latency issues. Maybe before the pending transactions went through, the block is already mined, so nothing inside the block can be seen or the block is mined too quickly without any transactions in it.

[ranochigo]

Definitely a great trivia question or something for this one, but we cannot confirm if it's the node of Satoshi being turned off for a while or something.

I'm thinking about this with latency issues. Maybe before the pending transactions went through, the block is already mined, so nothing inside the block can be seen or the block is mined too quickly without any transactions in it.

The first transaction made included in block 170 and no transactions were made prior. It is well known that Satoshi was presumably the one mining and given how the client should report the timestamp in the block header and by the nonce increment, he likely turned his miner off. Latency has nothing to do with this.

[pooya87]

You can model the timezone of Satoshi if you were to analyze the code commits, forum posting patterns among other things and you'll realize that Satoshi mostly follows a specific sleep schedule. A possibility could be Satoshi turned off their miner as LoyceV has said but it could also be that his PC is just that slow and unstable to find a block. CPU miners were fairly unstable and slow, even for 1 difficulty blocks especially how optimized it was.

Regardless, the nonce of the block is pretty special and follows a specific pattern. Jlopp has a nice writeup here: https://blog.lopp.net/was-satoshi-a-greedy-miner/

The extra nonce of block 15 is lower than block 14 (0x010a versus 0x013e) so if we subscribe to lopp theory there has to be a wrap around. Maybe the client could have been restarted (maybe shut down overnight to start in the morning => ~8-10 hours) then after starting it took a long time (14-16 hours) to find the block hence the high incrementing of the extranonce to 0x010a.

[Cricktor]

... but it could also be that his PC is just that slow and unstable to find a block. CPU miners were fairly unstable and slow, even for 1 difficulty blocks especially how optimized it was.

Regardless, the nonce of the block is pretty special and follows a specific pattern. Jlopp has a nice writeup here: https://blog.lopp.net/was-satoshi-a-greedy-miner/

Your assumption that Satoshi's mining computer(s) were slow and unstable is not quite supported by the findings around extra nonce values and their distribution and interpretation given by Lopp and Sergio Demian Lerner[1].

Have a look at the miner attribution displayed here https://bitcoinexplorer.org/blocks?limit=25&offset=0&sort=asc.
The graph at [1], the steeper slope of the dark blue colored dots can be interpreted that "Patoshi" had rather potent mining gear (computers, very likely not a single computer).

I'm with Sergio and his findings/modeling and believe that blocks attributed to the miner "Patoshi" are actually mostly those that Satoshi mined.

I don't know if the Patoshi blocks list has been updated (minor corrections are likely needed as there are spends from a few Patoshi attributed blocks that very certainly haven't been done by Satoshi, ie. the attribution must be wrong for those) because when I created a descriptor wallet that covers all output address types for the public keys of those coinbases, some spends in higher numbered blocks showed up that to almost certainly can't have been from Satoshi (very highly unlikely).

It was a fun project I started around the end of 2021 for a Bitcoin Core wallet with 21954 combo-descriptors; it was much less fun to sync it with older versions of Core because it literally took ages (many months!) on energy efficient hardware. I didn't want to waste too much energy than necessary and ran it on already running Raspi that powered one of my nodes. Poor little Raspi... 


[1] http://satoshiblocks.info/ and more links to articles on http://satoshiblocks.info/about.html
TL;DR -> https://bitslog.com/2019/04/16/the-return-of-the-deniers-and-the-revenge-of-patoshi/

[ranochigo]

Your assumption that Satoshi's mining computer(s) were slow and unstable is not quite supported by the findings around extra nonce values and their distribution and interpretation given by Lopp and Sergio Demian Lerner.

The graph at, the steeper slope of the dark blue colored dots can be interpreted that "Patoshi" had rather potent mining gear (computers, very likely not a single computer).

Actually, JLopp was the one who postulated that there were possible instances for which the miner crashed, rather than being turned off intentionally. This is done if you were to look at the larger dataset, which isn't very representative of smaller samples which were at the initial stages of Bitcoin which was even more experimental.

In addition, both JLopp and Sergio said that it is quite likely that they were a single quad core processor, rather than a mining farm. This can be collaborated by looking at the block intervals and the nonce increment, if you were to assume Satoshi wasn't lying.