Satoshi Nakamoto Leaves Us With Yet Another Bitcoin Mystery

WHO WE’RE FOLLOWING: Wicked Bitcoin

In 2024, a new enigma has emerged regarding the identity of Bitcoin’s founder, Satoshi Nakamoto.

This intriguing topic first cropped up on X, where the ever-controversial Wicked Bitcoin highlighted the discovery.

In essence, here are the key points:

It’s evident that Satoshi Nakamoto was an early miner of Bitcoin, as he distributed bitcoins to initial contributors. Since he didn’t claim a generous “founder’s allocation,” the accumulated coins must have been mined.
However, we still lack clarity about the total number of bitcoins minting by Satoshi. He only mentioned owning “a lot” of bitcoins once, but this statement is the only clue we have aside from one widely contested analysis done in 2013.
The 2013 study proposed that Satoshi’s mining activities were traceable on the blockchain through the so-called “Patoshi pattern.” To summarize, an early and significant miner modified how data was embedded onto the blockchain using a unique version of the ExtraNonce, which most believe could only have been executed by Nakamoto, given his familiarity with the early software.
Jameson Lopp, co-founder of Casa, built upon this research in 2022. He introduced further insights into this mysterious miner, indicating that they were not primarily concerned with maximizing profits. This finding was viewed by some as additional evidence supporting the idea that Patoshi was indeed Satoshi.
Recently, Wicked has added another layer to this mystery, referencing earlier analyses of “Patoshi.” By mapping this miner’s block creations on a date-time scale, he observed a significant gap in the timestamps for this miner’s blocks in early 2009.

What can we ultimately deduce from this data? As shown in Wicked’s comments section, opinions vary widely.

Compounding the issue is the scarce historical data on Bitcoin from 2009. The information available consists largely of a few public email threads and some private messages that have surfaced over the years (many revealed due to legal proceedings).

During the early months of 2009, Bitcoin forums were virtually non-existent, and it’s likely that only a handful of individuals were mining the network. Martii Malmi, Satoshi’s first key developer, was just commencing his work.

This scarcity of information means we lack a concrete timeline or clear understanding of what transpired beyond what the data presents, and at that, there isn’t an abundance of information – there were numerous days in 2009 without any Bitcoin transactions.

Wicked’s hypothesis posits that these gaps indicate moments when the “Patoshi miner” was offline and subsequently had to resume mining. When this powerful miner returned, they were able to overwrite any blocks that were mined in their absence.

Wicked draws several conclusions from this and even suggests that Satoshi may have been experimenting to assess how resilient the network would be against “51% attacks.” This scenario seems plausible, considering Satoshi’s primary contribution to the concept of digital cash was the idea that Bitcoin could thrive as long as the majority of participants acted honestly.

(One could argue—myself included—that this was Satoshi’s singular unique contribution to Bitcoin, adeptly merging well-established computer science principles.)

That said, this raises a slightly negative interpretation. An inadvertent 51% attack could have made honest mining irrelevant, and critics may seize upon this to characterize Satoshi as an erratic experimenter, similar to those seen on other chains today.

Nevertheless, much of this is speculative, and without additional analysis (or corroborating evidence), it remains challenging to reach definitive conclusions.

Regardless, it is fascinating to note that nearly 16 years later, Satoshi has managed to obscure his tracks so effectively in history.