5 entries
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.
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.
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.
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.