We may not know who Satoshi Nakamoto was, but at least this is one mystery we think we can solve. We reported last week about the latest findings of Sergio Dermain Lerner,
who is known for his discovery of the so-called "Patoshi pattern". His
latest research suggested that Satoshi Nakamoto likely used a single pc
to mine approximately 1.1 million Bitcoin (BTC).
However, it appears that there was something of even greater importance
lost in the excitement about this discovery. If Lerner's latest
findings are accurate, it would put an end to seven years worth of
speculation concerning the meaning behind the mysterious pattern.
Lerner first wrote
about the mysterious Bitcoin mining pattern back in March of 2013. Some
privacy flaws in the original Bitcoin code allowed him to discover
Satoshi's mining idiosyncrasies. The crux of the pattern arises from the
fact that Satoshi's mining code incremented the ExtraNonce field
differently than the default Bitcoin code. A couple of months ago,
Lerner also suggested that Satoshi refrained from mining in the first five minutes of the block. This gave rise to growing speculation about the meaning behind this pattern.
Some
have suggested that Satoshi was intentionally 'marking' their Bitcoins.
Others say that this was a way for the Satoshi team to demarcate their
portions of the fortune. Some speculate that Satoshi optimized their
equipment or code, allowing them to mine faster than anyone else. Yet
others believed that the pattern originated from the fact that Satoshi
was using around 50 machines for mining. This latter theory may have
given Craig Wright the idea to claim that he used a Bitcoin farm in
Australia to mine his coins.
The truth, however, appears to be
less exciting but more sound. Satoshi was using a multi-threaded pc for
mining (Lerner also suggested to us that possibly Satoshi was using
a Field-programmable gate array, which would be consistent with Satoshi apparently 'pre-inventing' GPU mining
and would not affect these conclusions). In order to avoid redundancy,
Satoshi would limit each thread to a distinct non-overlapping nonce
space. During Bitcoin mining, a nonce gets incremented with every
unsuccessful attempt to solve a hash puzzle. Thus, the mysterious
pattern may not have been created by choice, but rather as a side effect
of Satoshi's unique mining setup. Lerner agreed with this conclusion,
potentially allowing us to put the speculation over this theory to rest
once and for all.
source link : https://cointelegraph.com/news/mysterious-bitcoin-mining-pattern-solved-after-seven-years
