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How much BTC does Satoshi Nakamoto have?
This question seems to be very simple, but it has not yet been settled. Although discussions about Bitcoin were limited to a small circle of cypherpunks until mid-2010, Satoshi Nakamoto made the Bitcoin client available for download shortly after the genesis block was generated. According to Hal Finney’s recollection, he joined mining when the block height was over 70, and some early participants in Bitcoin also published evidence of joining mining before 2010. Before the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto's identity is cracked, all relevant speculations will not be confirmed or clearly falsified, but the data on the chain will give us an answer that may be very close to the truth.
The genesis block of Bitcoin was born on January 3, 2009. Then on January 9, the first version of Bitcoin v0.1 was released, ushering in the first batch of users including Hal Finney. In the Bitcoin protocol, the minimum difficulty is set to 1, which is also the initial setting of the protocol. After running at the minimum difficulty for nearly a year, on December 30, 2009, the Bitcoin network ushered in the first difficulty increase. At block height 32256, Bitcoin difficulty rose from 1 to 1.18 for the first time. From then on, the difficulty increased more and decreased. A difficulty of 1 means that if the network wants to maintain a block interval of 10 minutes, about 7.15MH/s computing power is required. Chain.info's Bitcoin computing power historical data also confirms this. The real-time status of Bitcoin on Chain.info shows that when the block height is 606742 (December 5, 2019), the computing power of the entire network is about 101EH/s, which is more than ten trillion times that of ten years ago.
Data source: Chain.info
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As mentioned above, a difficulty of 1 does not mean that all blocks in 2009 came from Satoshi Nakamoto. Although a trading market where bitcoins can be traded appeared in July 2010, it cannot be ruled out that some early miners have kept these bitcoins, so we cannot judge by the transfer situation. Given the computing power of the entire network in 2009 (less than 7.15MH/s), these early miners and the blocks they dug up will not have many, but this will cause a lot of interference in estimating which blocks are from Satoshi Nakamoto.
There are only addresses in Bitcoin's coinbase, but no names. In fact, the only address that we can determine to belong to Satoshi Nakamoto based on public information may be the block origin address at block height 9, because this address sent 10 BTC to Hal Finney at block height 12 (while the genesis block’s The 50BTC block reward is not included in the UTXO set, so it cannot actually be used). This is also the first transfer in the history of Bitcoin.
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So how do we distinguish Satoshi Nakamoto from other early miners?
Researcher Sergio Demián Lerner published a series of articles between 2013 and 2014 identifying blocks mined by Satoshi Nakamoto by the characteristics of the data contained in the blocks. The main basis is the regular change of ExtraNonce in the coinbase transfer, the law of Nonce and the time stamp. ExtraNonce is a parameter that provides additional entropy to the node when the Nonce of the mining node is exhausted and overflows, so that it is convenient to restart the search. This parameter is in coinbase, but it is not part of the protocol standard, and is recorded locally by each node. ExtraNonce will not return to zero after successful block generation, but will accumulate with the number of uses. Therefore, when there are few participating nodes in the early stage and the nodes produce blocks relatively densely, the ExtraNonce of the same node will show a regular linear growth. ExtraNonce is usually not reset unless the node is restarted.
By summarizing the ExtraNonce in Bitcoin blocks from 2009 to 2010, Lerner found that some blocks have a lot in common with this parameter:
Chart source: Sergio Demián Lerner
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4. There is no timestamp inversion in the blocks mined in this mode, which is statistically significantly different from other blocks.
Chart source: Sergio Demián Lerner
5. In this mode, the last byte of the Nonce of the block is not evenly distributed between 0 and 255, but concentrated between 0 and 9 and 19 and 58.
Chart source: Sergio Demián Lerner
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Chart source: Sergio Demián Lerner
Through the above model, Lerner found about 22,000 blocks that conform to the above rules from the first 500,000 blocks, and these blocks generated a total of about 1.1 million BTC. More than 90% of them were produced before block height 40,000, that is, before July 2010. As of April 2019, 99.9% of the 1.1 million BTC had not been spent (only 550 were donated in a similar way to Hal).
But Lerner then proposed the above two rules 4 and 5 to refute, so we are more inclined to believe Lerner's conclusion.
Chart source: organofcorti.blogspot.com
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