11 years ago, Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first Bitcoin in London, England

Original source: The Chain Bulletin

Original author: Doncho Karaivanov

In April 2011, when Satoshi Nakamoto decided to leave the Bitcoin community, he did not reply to the last email sent to him by Gavin Andresen. No one knows the reason for his departure, but he left a lot of information, allowing future generations to conduct in-depth research on Satoshi Nakamoto's whereabouts when he developed Bitcoin.

This article is from The Chain Bulletin. Analysts conducted an in-depth study of the location where Satoshi Nakamoto conducted Bitcoin research, trying to overturn or confirm the public's previous news about where Satoshi Nakamoto was located. The original data for this study came from the following points:

Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcointalk account (539 available posts)

34 of his emails on the cryptography and bitcoin mailing lists

He has 169 commits on SourceForge (SourceForge is also known as SF.net, a centralized place for open source software developers to manage development)

Metadata from the 2008 and 2009 versions of the Bitcoin whitepaper

Genesis block information

Wayback Machine archives

The timestamps for all of the above data start on October 31, 2008, when Satoshi first talked about Bitcoin on the Cryptography and Bitcoin mailing list, and end on December 13, 2010, when he sent his last email, with timestamps shown as UTC time, for a total of 206 days (non-consecutive) and 742 movements.

Based on the above data, the researchers compiled activity scatter plots according to different time zones to analyze when Satoshi Nakamoto was active and when he was inactive, and then further confirmed the most likely location of Satoshi Nakamoto's home based on other collected data.

Prior to this, the public's guesses about Satoshi Nakamoto's location were basically the following five time zones: UK (GMT), US Eastern Time Zone (EST), US Pacific Time Zone (PST), Japan Time Zone (JST), and Australia Time Zone (AEST). The latter two views can easily be proven to be unlikely, but the first three views require further research.

1. Bitcointalk Trends

From the creation of the account on November 19, 2009 to the last appearance on December 13, 2010, Satoshi Nakamoto spoke a total of 539 times during his active period on Bitcointalk, and all posts have timestamp information when they are published.

Since accessing the website from different locations will display the corresponding publishing date and time based on UTC, a chart of different time zones can be drawn based on this to confirm whether it is consistent with the initial conjecture.

Europe/London Time Zone

Scatter plot of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcointalk activity, first post on November 22, 2009 – last post on December 12, 2010, based on London, UK time zone

It is worth noting that the above picture is very confusing. People see the blank area in the middle and infer that in this time zone, Satoshi goes to bed at 6 am and sleeps until 1 pm. However, sometimes he is active between 6 am and 7 am, but this part of the data only accounts for 2% of all active data, which means that he usually does not start activity until the early morning (specific to this time zone), but only does so in a few cases.

A closer inspection of the data revealed that most of his last activity was between 1 and 3 a.m. To eliminate possible misinterpretations, the researcher plotted a 6-hour range of median last activity based on the available data and in the corresponding time zone graph.

US/Eastern Time Zone

Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcointalk trend scatter plot, based on the US Eastern Time Zone

US/Pacific Time Zone

Scatter plot of Satoshi’s Bitcointalk activity, based on the US Pacific time zone

At first glance, all three locations seem plausible. In London, he was a night owl, working until the early hours and sleeping until noon; on the East Coast of the United States, he worked until the end of the day and slept until the morning; on the West Coast, he was an early bird, going to bed early in the evening and waking up early. If we rely on this data alone, we cannot determine beyond a reasonable doubt in which time zone Satoshi Nakamoto lives, and additional analysis is needed.

2. Commits

In the early stages of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto and a few developers who joined the Bitcoin project early on might have worked without SVN or used local repositories.

On August 30, 2009, the project progress was uploaded to SourceForge, and all submission records can be traced back. It was found that Satoshi Nakamoto submitted a total of 169 times under the username "s_nakamoto", and the timestamp of each submission is in UTC time format. Draw a scatter plot in the same way as the Bitcointalk post above to see when Satoshi Nakamoto was active on SourceForge.

Europe/London Time

Scatter plot of Satoshi Nakamoto's SourceForge activity, first seen on October 21, 2009 - last seen on December 15, 2010, based on London, UK time zone

US/EST

Scatter plot of Satoshi's SourceForge activity, based on the Eastern Time Zone of the United States

US/Pacific Time Zone

Scatter plot of Satoshi's SourceForge activity, based on the US Pacific time zone

From the above scatter plot, we can find that the information revealed by Commit is consistent with the Bitcointalk dynamics, which can be said to be good news, but it does not have a clear information direction. At present, all three statements are possible.

Email campaigns

On October 31, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto announced the Bitcoin project on the cryptography mailing list. He then continued to communicate with members on the mailing list who were interested in Bitcoin and wanted to learn more about it. He discussed the features of the project in detail, such as the double-spending problem that everyone was concerned about and Bitcoin’s solution. The last email appeared on December 13, 2010.

There are more emails from Satoshi to other developers, but we were unable to verify that the timestamps for emails to Mike Hearn, Wei Dai, Lazlo Hanecz, Jon Matonis, and Dustin Trammel were in UTC. Therefore, the data used for this part of the analysis was limited to the cryptocurrency and bitcoin mailing lists.

Europe/London Time

Scatter plot of Satoshi Nakamoto’s email movements, first email on October 21, 2009 – last email on December 15, 2010, based on the London time zone, UK

US/EST

Scatter plot of Satoshi’s email movements, based on the US Pacific time zone

US/Pacific Time Zone

Scatter plot of Satoshi’s email movements, based on the US Pacific time zone

Again, the above information still doesn't tip the scales in favor of any of the three possible locations. If we overlap these three types of data, let's see what we find.

All Events

Merging all 539 Bitcointalk emails, 169 commits, and 34 email timestamps from Satoshi Nakamoto gives a better idea of ​​his activity patterns. Again, as a reminder: Satoshi’s first activity was on October 31, 2008, when he first announced Bitcoin on the mailing list, and his last activity was on December 13, when he released Bitcoin version 0.3.19.

Europe/London Time

Scatter plot of Satoshi’s Bitcointalk, SourceForge, and email activity, based on London, UK time.

US/Eastern Time Zone

Scatter plot of Satoshi’s Bitcointalk, SourceForge, and email activity, based on US Eastern Time

US/Pacific Time Zone

Scatter plot of Satoshi’s Bitcointalk, SourceForge, and email activity, based on US Pacific Time

Did you notice the big "S" in London, England and the Eastern Time Zone in the United States? If plotting all the timestamp data on a graph still doesn't show where it belongs, then it's probably one of these three locations.

Additionally, this is a good way to exclude Japan and Australia:

Asia/Tokyo Time Zone

Scatter plot of Satoshi’s Bitcointalk, SourceForge, and email activity, based on Tokyo time in Japan

Obviously, the information in the above picture shows that Japan is unlikely (active from early morning to noon). There are other evidences that can also rule out the possibility of Japan, which will not be discussed here.

Australia/Sydney Time Zone

Scatter plot of Satoshi’s Bitcointalk, SourceForge, and email activity, based on Sydney time zone

Unless Satoshi Nakamoto is a "vampire" (active in the early morning), this speculation is impossible.

In short, Satoshi Nakamoto's movements on Bitcointalk, SourceForge, and his email messages provide a clearer framework for us to speculate on his location.

Bitcoin Genesis Block

When we look at Bitcoin’s genesis block and the information embedded in it, we can see that the story probably began in the Greenwich time zone in the UK.

The key detail is the headline, “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”, which appeared in The Times on 3 January 2009:

Of course, even if Satoshi Nakamoto lived anywhere in the United States, he could have put this sentence in the genesis block. But the problem was that this issue of The Times was not distributed in the United States at the time. On May 26, 2006, The New York Times announced plans to publish the daily American edition of The Times of London (Note: The Times is sometimes also referred to as The London Times by English speakers) in New York and Washington on June 6, 2006.

However, even aside from the geographical limitations of the American edition of The Times, it is different from the British edition in terms of layout, copy editing, etc. It is unlikely that the front page of the American edition of the newspaper on January 3, 2009 would have adopted the same format as the British edition, and the analysis team did not find a screenshot of the American edition of The Times on January 3, 2009 anywhere.

That being said, you could argue that Satoshi could have been accessed through the internet, and that’s possible. At the time, the New York Times had set up a website (timesonline.co.), but the article title seemed slightly different: Chancellor Alistair Darling on brink of second bailout for banks. It also had the Speaker’s name on it.

This means that it is unlikely that Satoshi read the article on the website, and even if he did, he would most likely use the website's title for the genesis block instead of the newspaper version.

At this point, the balance of judgment leans towards the UK Greenwich time zone. And this time the information does not include that he spells words with -ise instead of -ize at the end, and -our instead of -or, such as analysis, organize, neighbor and colour. In addition, he also used the word "bloody" (note: one of the best swear words in English, most of which are used to express surprise, while Americans avoid saying "bloody" because it sounds silly). According to the New York Times article, analysts not only believe that he is British, but also that he is working on Bitcoin research in London.

New York Times readership statistics from July 8, 2008 to December 8, 2008, National Readership Survey/Website Time Machine

As shown above, data from the 2008 National Readership Survey shows the readership statistics of The Times that year. Of the 1.8 million print readers, 770,000 (43%) were from London, while the rest were from different parts of the UK. This means that almost one in every two people in London reads The Times. Combining all the data, it is speculated that Satoshi Nakamoto was likely to have lived in London between 2008 and 2010.

Imperfections

A theory is not a good theory if it is not attacked from all angles. The timestamp data we quoted is not controversial, and this is the activity pattern of Satoshi Nakamoto. However, if we do not consider the signature information of the genesis block, we need to consider something else.

Metadata of the white paper

The PDF file contains metadata. When Satoshi Nakamoto wrote the first version of the Bitcoin white paper and saved it on his computer, the white paper included a timestamp and, more importantly, information about the time zone in which the computer was located.

One explanation for the difference in metadata between the two versions of the whitepaper is that Satoshi used a virtual machine for some of his activities and set the time zone to an arbitrary time zone. Another possibility is that he manually manipulated the time zone of his computer when processing these files.

Another possibility is that Satoshi did not create the PDF document himself, he may have written the paper in a Word document and then sent it to someone for final editing. This may explain why the time zones of the two versions are different, because he may have sent the second version of the paper to another person.

To sum up, if Satoshi did create these PDF files, and we know he was very careful about privacy, it is unlikely that he would forget to clear/modify the metadata in them. Therefore, we can reasonably assume that he did not think that there was any metadata in the PDF that would expose him in any way, making the time zone data in it irrelevant.

The Times digital website

As we mentioned before, the information that Satoshi saw on the website may not include the title "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" (because the title of the news on the website is not this), but the title was placed in the genesis block. Web archives show that there is a page on the Times website showing a screenshot of the daily newspaper cover uploaded.

Since November 19, 2008, the digital newspaper has uploaded a snapshot of its print edition cover/website time machine

However, the website time machine did not record the snapshot of January 3, 2009, but it is also possible that the screenshot of the newspaper cover on that day was reported. Generally, other publications also publish a summary of the headlines of newspapers around the world every day, including Reuters, which once carried the headline "Chancellor is about to implement a second bailout for banks" in an opinion article on January 3, 2009.

In addition, The Times also provides an electronic newspaper subscription service, where subscribers can pay to purchase the electronic version of the newspaper. All this information shows that even if Satoshi Nakamoto lived in the United States, he could see the news headlines marked in the Genesis Block from many channels.

Yet, why would anyone go to the Times newspaper page or use their e-newspaper subscription option to read the cover when they can simply go to the website homepage to read the news? And, anyone who has read Satoshi’s emails and forum posts knows that Satoshi knew he was onto something special. He tried not to hype it up too much, but it was clear that he thought Bitcoin had a future.

It is quite possible that the genesis block was such an important historical event for Satoshi that he might have decided to include a message in it that would stand the test of time forever. Of course, this also means that he would look for something themed, special, and memorable. However, even if so, such a "desire" would hardly be obtained by reading a roundup of articles containing 20 headlines or listening to a morning show host reading newspaper headlines, right?

Perhaps Satoshi heard about this article a few days later and thought it was perfect for delivering information in the genesis block. After the genesis block was mined, the first bitcoin was mined on January 9, 2009. It is conceivable that he learned about this article on January 7, rewrote the code of the genesis block that day, and then mined the first block the next day, creating the first BTC transaction between him and Hal Finney. This sentence is a few lines in the Bitcoin source code, from version 0.1.0:

This is unlikely to happen, as the genesis block (block.ntime) is timestamped at 18:15:05 UTC on January 3, 2009. Hearing about it a few days after the article was published and then going back to set the genesis block timestamp to any random time from January 3, 2009 is extremely unlikely.

Finally, is it possible that the article on the Times website did not originally have the Speaker in the title, but was later updated to include it? This is unlikely, as we found an article on January 3, 2009 that quoted the Times article, but the title did have this information.

in conclusion

Now, we can probably conclude with relative certainty that when Satoshi Nakamoto was working on Bitcoin, he was most likely living in the UK, or in London. Whether it is his writing style, his activity patterns, or the hidden information in the genesis block, all indicate that the British capital is his most likely location.