The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin creator, Visionary and Genius

I won’t discuss anything in this post. I’m tired of discussing technical things with people with skewed opinions and monetary interest. I’ve talked enough in the Bitcointalk forum about Satoshi. Some people screamed at me. But a picture is worth a thousand words. And I will show pictures that everyone can replicate. Please forgive me for the awful image design.

The graphs were made by a new block chain analysis technique I tested that consist on tracking the ExtraNonce fields in the coinbase field of the coinbase transaction, which is the one that creates bitcoins. As far as I know, is hasn’t been done before. In the following graphs each dot is the creation of 50 BTC. I have only analyzed and printed graphs from block 0 upto block 36288. I wonder what will I get when I process the remaining three years.
The extraNonce fields increments every time the nonce fields (which is 32 bits) overflows, so it’s a slow realtime clock, until the application is restarted, in which case it goes back to 1. Note the X-Axis in the graphs is not time (as it’s said on the graph). It’s the block number (that’s a mistake).

I don’t think there is a moral obligation not to publish this information since it’s already on public domain (the blockchain). Also Satoshi was completely aware of the poor anonymization capabilities of Bitcoin (a trade-off for performance and reduced bandwidth). Nevertheless, this lost of privacy could have been absent if random ExtraNonces had been used instead of incremental ones. So I could be thought as a Bitcoin privacy vulnerability for the miners.

Disclaimer: I can’t assure with 100% certainty that the all the black dots are owned by Satoshi, but almost all are owned by a single entity, and that entity began mining right from block 1, and with the same performance as the genesis block. It can be identified by constant slope segments that occasionally restart. Also this entity is the only entity that has shown complete trust in Bitcoin, since it hasn’t spend any coins (as last as the eye can see). I estimate at eyesight that Satoshi fortune is around 1M Bitcoins, or 100M USD at current exchange rate. I’m sure there will be plenty of people that will carefully analyze the source data set and come up with the exact figure, which will be very close, but nevertheless they will scream at me again.

All10-5

The vertical lines in the graph below were added by me, to show when the mining application is restarted, approximately every 100 hours, probably to backup the wallet.

All10-5-p2

One of the consequences of these graph is that if the real name of the sender of a single transaction belonging to the entity is identified, then Satoshi mystery identity will be revealed. I bet that this will happen in the days following this post.

These are the tools and assumptions I made:

1. I used the file boostrap,dat, I assume that boostrap.dat contains only the best chain (not orphan blocks)

2. I only take into account coinbase transactions.

3. I’ve assumed that if a coinbase output is spent, then none of the spent coins went back to Satoshi.

Note that from the 1814400 BTC awarded, 1148800 BTC has never been spent (63%). I suppose (but have not checked it yet) that these are exactly the segments that belong to the mystery entity,
If someone wants to check my computations, is welcomed, because I used a special block chain parser made by myself with little testing.

If anyone wants the source data set, is here Upto36288.

If you like my work and want to encourage me in researching further you can donate to this address: 17mcFB7Xyymd9hxp2bgNPz1ruWsdoPoCnZ

Best regards,
Sergio.

Edit: For comparison, here is the same diagram but using time (instead block number) in the X-axis. Note that the slopes are now completely coherent.

All-t1000-5

,

  1. #1 by Lasse Birk Olesen on April 17, 2013 - 11:49 am

    “One of the consequences of these graph is that if the real name of the sender of a single transaction belonging to the entity is identified, then Satoshi mystery identity will be revealed. I bet that this will happen in the days following this post.”

    I’m guessing Satoshi is mixing his coins using one of several shared wallets or mixing services available for this before spending them. In that case the blockchain is not of much use.

    • #2 by SDLerner on April 17, 2013 - 1:20 pm

      But then the shared wallet site or the mixing service site will know he’s Satoshi. I think either Satoshi never ever spend those coins or he reveals his identity with big glamour before anyone finds out.
      Other options is that he builds a mixer/wallet service himself in order to anonymize his own coins.

      • #3 by Vpp on April 17, 2013 - 2:27 pm

        Most mixer are anonymous. As for the IP well… Tor/vpn…

      • #4 by rfk on April 17, 2013 - 9:14 pm

        Satoshi is dead. His coins will never be spent until someone cracks them. That is how we will know it has happened.

  2. #5 by Jack B. on April 18, 2013 - 1:47 am

    It’s not what this individual now has that’s important…. he’s what he or she is going to do with this new wealth to better the world.

  3. #6 by Pete on April 18, 2013 - 5:49 am

    He can start an anonimizing website to begin with.

  4. #7 by D on April 18, 2013 - 8:24 am

    Everybody is assuming he will be able to sell his 1M bitcoins for $100 a piece; let’s not forget that selling just 20,000 bitcoins nearly halves the price of 1bitcoin. Good luck to him finding a sucker who wants to buy large quantities via dark pools.

  5. #8 by Stan on April 18, 2013 - 12:10 pm

    I will agree that this is well deserved money! Anybody who has such an impact on the whole internet economy deserves it.

    Thumbs up! Very good analysis!

  6. #9 by Lelala on April 18, 2013 - 1:34 pm

    It will be interesting, what the alternatives of BitCoin (LiteCoin, PPCoin etc.) will achieve here – especially regarding the issues of the transactional-speed, e.g. online-shops (coinbase blog has a post on this question)

  7. #10 by Vedetta on April 18, 2013 - 6:08 pm

    “When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away. I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin. I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction, when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test.” -Hal Finney
    https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.msg1643833#msg1643833

    Maybe those coins belong to no one now and are lost forever.
    Very nice analysis work.

  8. #11 by dwoowb on April 18, 2013 - 7:03 pm

    Reblogged this on dwoowb and commented:
    the investigations and findings in the coming days should prove quite insightful. we wait with bated breath.

  9. #12 by Josh @ MiningRigs.com on April 18, 2013 - 9:37 pm

    Fascinating analysis! Some folks think the true identity of ‘Satoshi’ is a Russian programmer. Whoever he/she/they are, the world’s history of currency will never be the same.

  10. #13 by harish on April 22, 2013 - 12:10 pm

    Bitcoin is a Wonder. I never expected price to increase, When I went through AirVPN, I came across Bitcoins accepted here. At that time Bitcoin was $17. Lets see how it changes world.

  11. #14 by Harry Evelegh on April 25, 2013 - 10:40 pm

    Fascinating, thanks.

  12. #15 by Adam Back on April 29, 2013 - 7:41 pm

    Did you do the follow on analysis mentioned to figure out if he spent any of the coins?
    (Interesting analysis btw)

    I would think if he were inclined he could likely sell the coins more conventionally eg via a lawyer acting as a privacy preserving intermediary. Or from later coins first, not subject to the privacy bug. As I understand it such things have happened in eg publishing world, and I guess there’s probably a film trope version of that too.

    So I was more curious if he spent or cashed any of them, than expecting you would get any hint of who Nakamoto is from the exercise. If any cashed or transferred the dates of the transfers – would show that Nakamoto is alive an trading.

    You have to bear in mind that Nakamoto knows about the bug, the bug was fixed (when btw?) and so can take appropriate counter measures as discussed above so that a sale would probably not be him directly (eg mixing or via a lawyer etc).

    Adam

  13. #16 by Chris 'Xenon' Hanson on May 6, 2013 - 5:45 pm

    Were all of the coins mined to a single address?

    • #17 by SDLerner on May 6, 2013 - 8:12 pm

      No.

      • #18 by Chris 'Xenon' Hanson on May 6, 2013 - 9:36 pm

        I’d be interested in seeing a summary of the different addresses used and how much was mined to each. From there, perhaps others could try to extrapolate more information.

      • #19 by SDLerner on May 7, 2013 - 6:02 pm

        Each block was mined to a different randomly generated address, so there is no information that can be extracted from that summary.

  14. #20 by George Spencer on May 7, 2013 - 11:17 am

    It would be interesting if you could build a script to scan the blockchain every day, for example, to see if any of Satoshi’s coins have been moved.

    Certainly if they were moved, it could show a big effect on the bitcoin price and economy.

    • #21 by SDLerner on May 7, 2013 - 5:47 pm

      I think that research lies on the limit of public information right and Satoshi’s privacy. I will no dig further in that direction.

  15. #22 by Bitcoin Blog on May 23, 2013 - 11:52 pm

    Very intriguing write-up. I’m sure if Satoshi is out there he is still waiting for his brainchild to evolve before he moves any of his coin.

  16. #23 by Sebastian on May 15, 2014 - 3:47 pm

    Did he stop mining?

    • #24 by SDLerner on May 15, 2014 - 6:41 pm

      It looks like.

      • #25 by Sebastian on May 15, 2014 - 7:47 pm

        Interesting. I wonder what he will do with it if at all. It could hurt bitcoin very much selling those coins, he might donate it. Or he simple only wanted to jumpstart Bitcoin and doesnt plan to do anything with it. Though it looks like a risk in the wrong hands that doesnt care about the amount of wealth involved. Or is stupid, like someone finding his wallet somehow and trying to make it to fiat.

  17. #26 by spirozh on June 2, 2014 - 9:59 pm

    I like to think that he dropped the keys to them.

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