Looks like Satoshi Nakamoto has left us with another mystery

WHO WE FOLLOW: Wicked Bitcoin

It’s 2024 and a new mystery is surfacing surrounding Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.

In this case, talk of a new enigma first appeared on X, where everyone’s favorite artist, Wicked Bitcoin, posted the discovery.

Essentially, the discovery boils down to this:

1. It’s clear that Satoshi Nakamoto was an early Bitcoin miner – after all, he sent bitcoins to early contributors, and since he didn’t settle for a sweet “founder’s allocation”, they could only have come from mining.
2. That said, we don’t really know how many bitcoins Satoshi mined. (He has never commented publicly, aside from one reported instance where he claimed to “own a lot” of bitcoins.) Most of the “common knowledge” comes from a 2013 study, and although he has become something of a tradition, there is much dispute as to what it proves.
3. Essentially, the study suggested that Satoshi’s mining activity was visible on the blockchain through what was called the “Patoshi pattern.” Long story short, a very large early miner changed the way it incorporated data into the blockchain (via a non-standard iteration of ExtraNonce) and most believe that this could only have been done by Nakamoto (who knew best much about the software at the beginning).
4. Jameson Lopp (the co-founder of Casa) built on this work in 2022. He added new analysis about this mysterious miner, including the finding that they were not looking to maximize their profitability. Some considered this another strong data point, Patoshi was Satoshi.
5. Now, Wicked adds to the mystery, one that alludes to previous “Patoshi” analyses. Essentially, by plotting this miner’s blocks on a date-time axis, he finds that there is a noticeable gap in the timestamps of this miner’s blocks in early 2009.

Of course, as to what we can conclude from this data, as Wicked’s comments section shows, that’s up for debate.

Adding to this problem is the fact that there is a dearth of historical information about Bitcoin since 2009. What has been uncovered is a few public mailing lists and private correspondences that have been published over the years (some forced by the judgment).

In May-June 2009, there were no Bitcoin forums and there may have been only a dozen people mining the network. Martii Malmi, (Satoshi’s first real developer) would have just started his work.

This means that we don’t really have a concrete timeline or what happened and why, other than what is visible in the data, and there isn’t even that much to talk about – there were many days in 2009 that didn’t there have been any Bitcoin transactions.

Wicked’s thesis here is that the gaps above show instances where the “Patoshi miner” went offline and then had to restart operations. At this point, the miner was so powerful that he simply overwrote any blocks found by other miners in their absence.

Wicked draws some conclusions from this, going so far as to suggest that Satoshi may have tested how well the network held up to “51% attacks”. This would be plausible – after all, the idea that Bitcoin was robust enough to work as long as most participants were honest was its major contribution to digital cash as a concept.

(Indeed, you could argue (as I did) that this is the only new thing Satoshi brought to Bitcoin, his main skill being taking hardened computer science concepts and stitching them together.)

That said, there is a bit of a bearish reading here. An accidental 51% attack would still have made honest mining moot, and this could be fodder for critics who like to paint Satoshi as the kind of errant experimenter we see on other chains today.

Still, there’s a lot of conjecture here, and without more analysis (or more corroborating evidence) it’s hard to draw a firm conclusion.

In any case, we can marvel at the mystery that almost 16 years later, Satoshi has managed to hide his tracks from history so well.