In Bitcoin.pl I return again to the topic of the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. Graphic artist Wicked has published his new discovery.
Satoshi Nakamoto and the mysterious origins of BTC
We don’t know what happened to Nakamoto. At some point he simply disappeared. It is not known whether he died or the services became interested in him simply because he created Bitcoin.
Satoshi was one of the first miners in the Bitcoin network – he even sent BTC to his colleagues. To this day, however, we do not know how many bitcoins he mined exactly.
A study from 2013 shed some light on the matter. It showed that Satoshi’s mining activities are visible on the blockchain – the so-called “Patoshi pattern”. In short: an early Bitcoin miner changed the way data was embedded on the blockchain (via a custom iteration of ExtraNonce). It could have been Nakamoto.
Jameson Lopp, co-founder of Casa, returned to the above concept in 2022. He prepared a new analysis of the activities of this mysterious miner. He found that the latter was not seeking to maximize his own profitability. This is another sign that it may have been Satoshi, an idealist who created Bitcoin not for his own benefit.
Now the aforementioned Wicked appears in this story. In his post on X, he refers to previous analyzes regarding “Patoshi”. Essentially, by plotting the blocks mined by this miner on a date-time axis, he discovered that there was a noticeable gap in the timestamps of the blocks mined by this miner. This one appears in early 2009.
Wickeda claims that the above vulnerabilities occurred when “Patoshi” went offline and then had to restart BTC mining operations. At this point in the network’s existence, this miner was so powerful that it simply overwrote any blocks found by other miners.
Was it about a general test?
Wicked draws a few conclusions from all this. He believes that Satoshi may have been testing how well his network would withstand a “51% attack,” a situation where centralization occurs – one entity has more power than all others.
Today it is known that the Bitcoin network has never been attacked in the above way. The fact that “Patoshi” is Satoshi is proven by the fact that he did not use his original advantage in the network and allowed other mines to grow stronger.