Strong Evidence Suggests a Single Entity Mined More Than 1 Million Bitcoin
![Strong Evidence Shows a Single Miner Mined More Than a Million Bitcoin](https://news.bitcoin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/1milli-768x517.jpg)
New Data Stemming from Bitcoin’s Earliest Miners Hardens Prior Evidence
Years ago, independent researcher and cryptographer Sergio Demián Lerner released one of the most in-depth studies concerning Bitcoin’s earliest mining periods. According to his first study published on April 17, 2013, the vast majority of the initial BTC mined was done by a single miner. Moreover, Lerner produced data sets from his blockchain analysis that tracked the extranonce fields within the coinbase field stemming from the coinbase transactions themselves. At the time Lerner estimated that the miner was able to gather precisely 1,814,400 BTC. In addition to this large number of mined coins, 63% of those coins, or 1.1 million, have never been spent since the day they were created.![Strong Evidence Suggests a Single Entity Mined More Than 1 Million Bitcoin Strong Evidence Suggests a Single Entity Mined More Than 1 Million Bitcoin](https://news.bitcoin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/zzmining.jpg)
![Strong Evidence Suggests a Single Entity Mined More Than 1 Million Bitcoin Strong Evidence Suggests a Single Entity Mined More Than 1 Million Bitcoin](https://news.bitcoin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/patoshiblocks.png)
- 99.9% of all Patoshi blocks are unspent.
- Each Patoshi block “links” to a block in the pattern set, but not to any of the remaining blocks.
- There are some time intervals where the Patoshi pattern interrupts abruptly.
- Mining pools were invented several years later.
- Mining pools were created to reduce reward variance due to the low individual probability of solving a block, but during 2009 single miners could easily solve blocks frequently.
![Strong Evidence Suggests a Single Entity Mined More Than 1 Million Bitcoin Strong Evidence Suggests a Single Entity Mined More Than 1 Million Bitcoin](https://news.bitcoin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/satoshi10daypause.png)
Clocks and Timestamps
Some of the latest evidence Lerner provides also concerns why he strongly believes the single miner extracted close to 1.1M coins, which is even more than the initial 1M BTC discovered by Lerner years ago. For instance, Lerner states that “computer clocks can be unsynchronized from each other,” “timestamps were not updated continuously during mining,” and “block timestamps are adjusted by the Bitcoin software to match the median time of the peers that are connected to a node.” Because of these reasons, the study notes that the same computer will almost never reverse its own timestamps and “the delta between inverted block timestamps indirectly measures the hashrate of the parent block miner.”![Strong Evidence Suggests a Single Entity Mined More Than 1 Million Bitcoin Strong Evidence Suggests a Single Entity Mined More Than 1 Million Bitcoin](https://news.bitcoin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/inversions.png)
A single software that controls how block templates are created — A single miner.The RSK Labs chief scientist concludes that there is evidence that links the Patoshi patterns to Satoshi but he prefers to stop there and “leave Patoshi alone once for all.” Lerner believes the evidence he provided is reliable but he expects more people to deny the information in forums. Lerner also infers that he has discovered a more precise figure and coded a more accurate pattern-following algorithm which can be viewed on his new site satoshiblocks.info. Do you think the Patoshi pattern belongs to Satoshi? Do you believe a single miner mined over 1.1 million BTC during the network’s earliest days? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.
Image credits: Shutterstock, Sergio Demián Lerner’s blog Bitslog.com, Pixabay, and Satoshiblocks.info.
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