Well, in my last article I wrote about the only bitcoins satoshi spent and where they wound up. Well, now I want to narrow that down further and answer the golden question:
Do you have any of satoshi's bitcoins?Before we get off hand, we need to establish first the traceability of bitcoin.
Bitcoins as a number are traceable, but not exactly as a material.
Satoshis, the consensual named smallest division of a bitcoin, are analogous to atoms in a way that they cannot be divided further. However, we cannot trace individual satoshis back. See the figure below:
Say someone mines Block A and Block B, each worth 50 BTC. Then the miner concatenates the coins to one output of 100 BTC, possibly at a new address. If the miner was to split the coins up again into two 50 BTC outputs, you could look at one or the other but you couldn't tell me which block they came from; A or B. We know they came from one of those two blocks, but not which.
Let's say we could dye the bitcoins from Block A another color, like red, and we'll make the coins from Block B colored blue. We'll assume that when coins from each block are mixed, the dye is as well.
So, as we can see, the 100 BTC when split back up can neither be identified as red or blue, but instead purple, which is 50% of each. It's not that each output has 25 RED BTC and 25 BLUE BTC, but the coins themselves are all PURPLE BTC, down to the satoshi. If we took one satoshi out of one of the new 25 BTC outputs, it would not be from either Block A or Block B but
both. The satoshi exists because of both blocks. In this case, 50% of each block.
Now, let's look at the REAL bitcoin block chain and trace satoshi's coins as far as we want.
We'll leave bitcoin outputs colored WHITE. Then we'll dye satoshi's bitcoins GREEN. We will define bitcoin royalty as how "green" the coins are.
Let's have a look. If you remember from my previous article, satoshi only spent the bitcoins from block 9, so we'll only be looking at those.
Above is the 50 BTC from block 9. We can see here the first transaction, where satoshi sent 10 BTC to Hal Finney as a test.
We'll look at those ten bitcoins more later. First though let's keep tracing the 40.
Now we see satoshi continued his spending spree, sending 10 BTC to an unknown individual and then 1 BTC to another. Those bitcoins are 100% royal (green), but have not been spent since 2009. Perhaps someday they will be, but for now they aren't going anywhere. Let's see where the next 29 BTC go.
This is where satoshi's spending ends. The remaining 18 BTC still belong to him. His last two expenditures have sent out a 1 BTC output and a 10 BTC output. Yes, they've been spent! Let's have a look at where they went.
Looks like the 10 & 1 BTC outputs belonged to the same person who mined block 360, because they went and mixed the three outputs together. 50 + 10 + 1 = 61 BTC, and that 61 BTC output is 18% royal. Like satoshi's 18 BTC output, This person's 61 BTC output remains unspent to this day. It's a $30,000 fortune asleep on a hard drive somewhere.
But we all want to know.
How "royal" are MY bitcoins?Well, every single royal output we've analyzed up to this point is left unspent. You know, except the one that was Hal Finney's 10 BTC received from Satoshi. Those 10 BTC account for all royal bitcoins in circulation today, so let's have a look at those.
Those ten bitcoins have quite the adventure. I'd go through the whole thing, but it's rather extensive. If you're really interested you can see my previous article:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=548508.0However, I will take the liberty of cutting to the chase; That is to say, where the bitcoins are first mixed in with non-royal coins.
Eventually, all those ten coins arrive at these outputs:
1.69 BTC from Hal's ten are unspent today. However the remaining 8.31 BTC - across seven outputs - were mixed with non-royal coins!
We'll be looking at each of them separately. Let's start with the first spent one on the left.
This one was mixed in with a 0.01 BTC output. I've confirmed that this particular output was of 0% royalty by tracing it as far back as possible. It was painstaking and I'm probably going to get tendinitis, but the 0.01 BTC was a faucet dispense. In fact, the dispense was from Gavin Andresen's faucet, whose money came initially from mining.
Well, I could keep tracing this coin for a while, but it'll take some time. So, I hope you'll let me have that.
I will release another article in the future, including how to determine the royalty of your coins.
I think it'd be a pleasant surprise to learn your wallet holds some of satoshi's coins.
My previous articles:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=548508.0https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=516339.0
