23 entries
Satoshi clarifies that the requirement is for 'the good guys collectively' to have more CPU power than any single attacker, and explains how smaller operations could profitably generate bitcoins.
Hal Finney congratulates Satoshi on the first alpha release and performs his famous thought experiment: if Bitcoin becomes the world's dominant payment system, each coin would be worth approximately $10 million — making early mining 'quite a good bet, with a payoff of something like 100 million to 1.'
The first known tweet about Bitcoin. Hal Finney posted 'Running bitcoin' on January 10, 2009 (PST) / January 11, 2009 (UTC), the same day the Bitcoin v0.1 software was publicly released. He was the first person other than Satoshi to run Bitcoin.
Dustin Trammell's first email to Satoshi Nakamoto after downloading and running the Bitcoin alpha release. Trammell reports on his experience running the software, mentions a public timestamp service, and asks about the coin maturity system after seeing generated coins showing 0.00 credit.
Satoshi explains Bitcoin's proof-of-work mining, halving schedule, and fixed supply in response to questions from Joerg Baach and Sepp Hasslberger, comparing it to a precious metal where supply is predetermined and value changes.
Mike Hearn contacts Satoshi Nakamoto for the first time with questions about Bitcoin's scalability, mining hardware, inflation schedule, and coin denominations.
Satoshi addresses concerns about Bitcoin's energy consumption, arguing it would be far less than traditional banking while acknowledging the tension between economic liberty and conservation.
NewLibertyStandard published the first-ever exchange rate for Bitcoin: $1 = 1,309.03 BTC ($0.000764 per BTC). The rate was calculated based on the electricity cost required to mine Bitcoin — a rudimentary but historically significant first attempt to assign monetary value to Bitcoin.
Satoshi explains the economics of mining and the difficulty adjustment in plain terms, noting that the system is designed to be fair regardless of computing power.
RHorning advocates for UI tools to adjust fee schedules and mining policies, noting that free transactions currently work but may not be sustainable long-term.
Benjamin Wallace's feature in Wired magazine — one of the earliest major mainstream articles on Bitcoin. It traced the arc from Satoshi's whitepaper through the mining boom, the Mt. Gox hack, and the community's growing pains, and closed with Jeff Garzik's iconic line: 'We really don't care.'
Bitcoin researcher Sergio Demian Lerner published 'The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto,' identifying a distinctive mining pattern (later named 'Patoshi') in Bitcoin's earliest blocks. The analysis linked approximately 22,000 blocks (~1.1 million BTC) to a single miner presumed to be Satoshi Nakamoto. Virtually none of these coins have ever been spent.
Five months after his initial ExtraNonce analysis, Lerner discovered that Satoshi's nonce values had a highly non-random least significant byte (LSB) distribution — restricted to values [0..9] and [19..58], approximately 50 out of 256 possible values. This second fingerprint, independent of ExtraNonce, proved Satoshi used custom mining software with parallelized nonce space partitioning.
Wei Dai's LessWrong post revealing that Satoshi Nakamoto emailed him personally in early 2009 announcing Bitcoin v0.1, but he ignored it because he 'was more interested in Less Wrong than Cypherpunks at that point.' He later started mining in 2011 after seeing a LW article, turning ~$300 into six figures.
Comprehensive interview with Ray Dillinger by Tim Swanson, marking the 10th anniversary of the Bitcoin whitepaper. Dillinger reveals technical details of his code review, including the famous floating-point discovery and Satoshi's reasoning for using double-precision floats.
Six years after his original analysis, Lerner published 'The Return of the Deniers and the Revenge of Patoshi,' coining the term 'Patoshi' (Pattern + Satoshi), updating his estimate to ~22,000 blocks / ~1.1 million BTC, and providing new evidence: zero timestamp inversions between Patoshi blocks versus 224 among non-Patoshi blocks, proving a single PC clock.
Blockchain tracking service Whale Alert published an independent analysis confirming Satoshi mined 1,125,150 BTC across 22,503 of the first 54,316 blocks. The report claimed Satoshi used ~48 computers (or CPU threads), though this was disputed one month later by Lerner's re-mining simulation proving a single multi-threaded PC. The report's core finding — that Satoshi mined to protect the network, not for profit — aligns with the broader research consensus.
Lerner published 'The Patoshi Mining Machine,' using re-mining simulation to prove that Satoshi mined on a single high-end CPU with 5 parallel threads — not 50+ networked computers. The nonce space was divided into 5 subranges with sequential inner scanning, producing a 78% high-value bias that is inconsistent with independent machines. This directly refuted Whale Alert's July 2020 claim of ~48 computers.
Multiple blockchain analyses estimate that Satoshi Nakamoto mined approximately 1.1 million bitcoins in Bitcoin's earliest days, with none of these coins having ever been spent.
Reykjavik University researchers publish the first peer-reviewed academic study of the Patoshi pattern in PLOS ONE. The paper identifies two distinct nonce anomalies — the 'P anomaly' (extended Patoshi) and the 'Z anomaly' (zerononce) — and crucially finds that the P anomaly appears in ALL of the first 64 blocks mined, including Block 12 which was previously classified as non-Patoshi by ExtraNonce analysis.
In a detailed podcast interview, security researcher Dustin Trammell ('Druid') describes his experience as possibly the second node on the Bitcoin network. He recalls seeing only 'one other node' for 4-6 hours after first connecting, not realizing mining was disabled by default, and not starting to mine until 4-5 days later.
Bitcoin researcher Jameson Lopp demonstrates that Satoshi deliberately throttled mining capacity, earning only ~1.1 million BTC when full-capacity mining could have yielded ~2.19 million BTC. Lopp concludes: 'Anyone who claims that Satoshi was greedy simply hasn't done the math.'
Pete Rizzo investigates the unexplained ~5-day, 8-hour gap between the Genesis Block (January 3, 2009) and Block 1 (January 9, 2009), framing it as one of Bitcoin's enduring unsolved mysteries.