Research on early mining models: Satoshi Nakamoto was more likely to work alone, not as a team

Sergio Dermain Lerner, a researcher who studies the original mining model of Bitcoin, recently turned his attention to the Bitcoin blocks mined by Satoshi Nakamoto.

His research is based on irregular patterns in the least significant byte (LSB) of a block’s nonce field.

In June, Lerner published an article that expanded on his original 2013 research. He suggested that for unknown reasons, Satoshi did not mine in the first five minutes of the block interval. Other researchers have also expanded on Lerner's research. TechMiX showed that all the blocks mined by Satoshi could be divided into five baskets based on the frequency distribution of Nonce LSB values.

Each attempt to solve a mining puzzle increases the nonce by one. Apparently, Satoshi’s device did not use the entire available nonce space, but only focused on a limited range. Lerner’s latest research shows that Satoshi was decreasing the nonce value:

“The results show that mining again shows a strong tendency for the Patoshi (Patoshi is the name Lerner gave to the miner who mined in 2009-2010) mining algorithm to choose higher nonces when scanning the internal nonces. This trend shows that nonces are decreasing, which is the opposite of the Satoshi client version 0.1.”

This leads to a more interesting conclusion, and perhaps ends the discussion about the type of device Satoshi used:

“Since the nonce skew decreases when analyzing both subroutines together, this suggests that Patoshi scanned all 5 subroutines in parallel, but each subroutine was scanned sequentially. This contradicts the theory that Patoshi deployed the first mining farm consisting of 50 independent computers (or any other highly decoupled system), and supports the theory that Patoshi was simply multithreading on a high-end CPU.”

If Lerner's conclusion is correct, then the hypothesis that Satoshi Nakamoto is a person rather than a team becomes more convincing. This also deals another blow to CSW (Craig Wright)'s claim that he is the creator of Bitcoin, as he has repeatedly stated that he used dozens of computers to mine early blocks.

Link to this article: https://www.8btc.com/article/638692
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