Blocks mined by Satoshi Nakamoto in those years, Patoshi Blocks

It has been 11 years since the first Bitcoin block was mined on January 2, 2009. So far, we have mined 87% of the total Bitcoin. In the early days of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto has been committed to maintaining the stable development of the network, contributing a lot of computing power and also obtaining a large amount of Bitcoin.

On May 20 this year, according to WhaleAlert monitoring, 50 BTC mined at block height 3654 on February 10, 2009 were transferred from address 17XiVVooLcdCUCMf9s4t4jTExacxwFS5uh. The current balance of this address is 0.0001 BTC. This address has been dormant since 2009. As soon as the news came out, it caused widespread speculation. Since 2013, some people have been trying to track the blocks mined by Satoshi Nakamoto. Based on several methods and visual data, Sergior has basically determined the approximate distribution of suspected Satoshi blocks. We also call Satoshi blocks Patoshi Blocks here.

01 Patoshi Mark — Hidden Extranonce

Satoshi Nakamoto's mining behavior during the birth of Bitcoin has always been the focus of research by Bitcoin enthusiasts. The satoshiblocks.info website has collected the most valuable research. First of all, in this incident, in the block where the transfer occurred, the Coinbase information contained an Extranonce parameter, which did not match the characteristics of the block mined by Satoshi Nakamoto. It is this feature that distinguishes Patoshi Blocks from the blocks mined by other network participants. First, let's take a look at a picture.

In the figure, the horizontal axis is the height of the block, and the vertical axis is the value of Extranonce. The black points are blocks that have not been moved, and the red points are blocks that have been transferred. From the figure, we can clearly see some points with the same slope and blocks that have not been moved, connected by a line. These blocks are speculated by us to be blocks suspected to be mined by Satoshi Nakamoto.

Through the website http://satoshiblocks.info, we can find some evidence more intuitively through the visual charts it has built.

First of all, we can see that the blue dots are the blocks suspected to be mined by Satoshi Nakamoto. The slopes of the blocks he mined are basically the same. After vertical comparison, the end of the line is basically connected to the starting point of the next line, which shows that Satoshi Nakamoto has been mining continuously during this time in order to protect the basic stability of the network.
The slopes of the lines composed of green dots in the figure are also very similar. This is because there were not many participants in the early Bitcoin network, and the hardware level for mining Bitcoin was roughly the same, and all mining was done through the CPU, which means that everyone's computing power was not much different.
It can be seen that many people had participated in mining before block 14,000, so the view that early blocks were mined by Satoshi Nakamoto is wrong. This has long been confirmed by Hal Finney, one of the earliest participants in Bitcoin. He participated in Bitcoin mining at the 70th block of the entire network and published content on the Btcointalk forum.

Through the above evidence, we can roughly understand the fact that Nakamoto's mining behavior has characteristics, so why does his Extranonce value have fixed characteristics when mining? We found the early Bitcoin code, version 0.1.5, released on September 16, 2009, to find clues.

As can be seen from the figure, when this function is started for Bitcoinmine, the Bitcoin mining process begins. Extranonce During the gradual mining process, as the first Input ScriptSig, Extranonce needs to be filled in ++ each time.

In this code, we can see that when the Bitcoin Nonce and the number behind it = 0, a check will be performed. The following three situations will increase the Extranonce value by 1:
• When Nonce is zero
• When the latest block is mined
• According to the latest transaction update time, 60 seconds have passed. When the transactions on the network are collected again within 60 seconds, Extranonce is actually like a counter. The slope of the counter is related to the performance of the computer itself. So after seeing these data, Sergior thought about why Satoshi’s slope is different from others? So we guess that Satoshi’s computer may be 4-5 times faster than others because his slope is much steeper than others.
There are several consensuses at present:
• When a new block appears, everyone’s Extranonce will increase by 1
• Whoever traverses the block header Nonce (2 to the power of 32) first will have his Extranonce incremented by 1
The faster the traversal, the steeper the visualization line, which means the frequency of Extranonce updates is faster. The frequency of Extranonce updates is related to the performance of the computer.

02 A mark for posterity - Lsb Nonce
Another piece of evidence is about LSB, which is a four-byte data. When Nonce is increased by 1 each time mining, the actual space is between 0-2 to the power of 32. If we break it into 4-byte data, after the last byte++, it cycles from 0-255 once. When it cycles to the next cycle, the second Byte will advance one bit. Here, we take the smallest bit of Nonce and the rightmost Byte for feature analysis.

After analysis, it was found that Patoshi Blocks has a specific pattern. The blocks he mined have a very high slope. From the above figure, we can see that in the blocks that have not been moved, the Nonce is mostly concentrated in the interval [0..9] U [19.. 58]. The probability of Satoshi mining a block in this interval is much higher, and the probability of mining a block in other intervals is very small.

From another picture, we can see that the Nonce of normal miners is evenly distributed in the range of 0-255, which means that everyone's mining is very random, which is also in line with the characteristics of the Bitcoin network. Satoshi Nakamoto only occupies 1/5 of the range. This also explains why Satoshi Nakamoto's mining performance is about 5 times that of other network participants, and the slope is higher than others, because the Nonce of the block header only allows 1/5 of the space, while other people who mine use up all the Nonce space, which takes more time.
In summary, there are three main reasons why these blocks were mined by Satoshi Nakamoto:
• Extranonce visualization shows that the lines have high slopes and a fixed pattern
• Lsb nonce is fixed in a specific range
• In addition, among the Patoshi Blocks analyzed, some of the transactions were made to Hal Finney, who was also involved in the project at the time. At that time, Finney was one of the few early developers who publicly disclosed his identity on the forum, which also indirectly proved that these addresses came from Satoshi Nakamoto.
The above evidence also shows that the block at block height 3654 does not meet the mining characteristics of Satoshi Nakamoto, so it cannot be proved that it is owned by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Currently, 99.9% of the bitcoins in Patoshi Blocks have not been transferred, and a small number of other blocks mined in the early days have not been moved. Satoshi Nakamoto was not the only one in the early days of the network. Some people have participated in the Bitcoin network since the network went online a few days ago.

03 Leave suspense and exit quietly

In addition to the above content, we also found a very interesting thing. From 30,000 to 50,000 Patoshi Blocks, their connection gradually became disconnected and was no longer continuous. There were some breakpoints. At the same time, a lot of green lines were added, indicating that more miners joined the network mining. It is speculated that this time period was also a transition period when Satoshi Nakamoto discovered that the Bitcoin network was gradually stabilizing and gradually withdrew from mining.
Regarding whether Satoshi Nakamoto used multiple computers for mining, according to analysis, Satoshi Nakamoto should have used one computer for mining, but the computer should have been updated once in the middle, because the slope later changed compared to before, but when using the Extranonce-based version, the Nonce parameters were customized.
So some people may wonder why Satoshi Nakamoto left these traces, which were not discovered until 4 years after the invention of Bitcoin, and on May 20, this incident was hotly discussed again. Regarding the coincidence of these things, we think Satoshi Nakamoto should have done it on purpose. In the current Bitcoin code, the Nonce distribution of everyone is uniform, and only Satoshi Nakamoto has the characteristics. As for whether such a high slope is generated by a mining pool or a few miners, because there was no concept of cooperative mining at that time, everyone could mine Bitcoin through a single CPU, which was also ruled out.
Satoshi Nakamoto knew that such operations would leave traces and would be analyzed by later people. It might also be to prove that the blocks he mined that year were different from others. Satoshi's behavior will be recorded in the blockchain forever with its unique characteristics and will never be tampered with.
In addition to proving one's identity to the world, it may also be saying that the coins I have mined are just there, and their every move is monitored and watched by everyone. This further proves that the Bitcoin network is truly decentralized. Everyone can browse any transfer or transaction on the network. Everything is traceable, and no one can escape the supervision of any Bitcoin network participant.