Who we are following: rogue bitcoin
It’s 2024 and a new mystery is emerging around Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Case in point, the discussion of a new puzzle appeared first on X, where everyone’s favorite artist rogue bitcoin Search posted.
Basically, this search is limited to:
- It is clear that Satoshi Nakamoto was an early Bitcoin miner – after all, he sent Bitcoins to early contributors, and since he had not established himself with a good “founder’s allocation”, they could only come from mining.
- That said, we don’t actually know how many Bitcoins Satoshi mined. (He has never commented on this publicly, except for one reported instance where he claimed to own “a lot” of Bitcoin.) Much of this “common knowledge” is from one study. done in 2013And while it has become somewhat of a lore, there is much controversy over what it proves.
- Essentially, the study showed that Satoshi’s mining activity was visible on the blockchain through “Patoshi patterns.” Long story short, an early, very large miner changed the way data is embedded on the blockchain (via a non-standard iteration of extraneous), and most believe it was only done by Nakamoto. (who knew the most about the software in its infancy).
- jameson lope (co-founder of CASA) worked on this in 2022. They added new analysis about this mysterious miner, including finding that they were not trying to maximize their profitability. Some people felt that this was another strong data point was Patoshi Satoshi.
- Now, Rogue is adding to that mystery, pointing to earlier “patoshi” analyses. Essentially, by plotting this miner’s block on the date-time axis, he finds that there is a noticeable difference in the timestamp of this miner’s block at the beginning of 2009.
Of course, what conclusions we can draw from this data, as Wicked’s comments section shows, is a matter of debate.
Adding to the issue is the lack of historical information about Bitcoin since 2009. What has been exposed is the equivalent of some public email lists and private correspondence that have been published over the years (some forced due to court hearings).
As of May–June 2009, there were no Bitcoin forums, and it is possible that there may have been only a dozen people mining on the network. Marty Malmi, (Satoshi’s first real right-handed developer) may be just getting started.
This means we don’t really have a solid timeline or understanding of what happened and why, other than what is visible from looking at the data, and there, there isn’t much to discuss – several days in 2009. There were no Bitcoin transactions when this happened.
rogue’s thesis Here’s why The above intervals show instances where “Patoshi Miner” went offline, and then had to restart operations. At this point, miners were so powerful that they easily deleted any blocks found by other miners in their absence.
Wicked draws some conclusions from this, even suggesting that Satoshi may be testing how well the network stands up to “51% attacks.” This would be laudable – after all, the idea that Bitcoin was strong enough to operate as long as the majority of participants were honest was a major contribution to digital cash as a concept.
(In fact, you could argue (as I have) that the only thing Satoshi brought to Bitcoin that was new was that his primary skill was taking hard computer science concepts and linking them together.)
That said, there is some bearishness here. An accidental 51% attack would still have made honest mining controversial, and it could be fodder for critics who like to portray Satoshi as the kind of misguided experimenter we see in other chains today. .
Still, there are a lot of guesses here, and it’s hard to draw any firm conclusions without more analysis (or more confirmed evidence).
At any rate, we can marvel at the mystery of why, almost 16 years later, Satoshi has succeeded so well in hiding his traces from history.
