Mysterious Bitcoin mining pattern may have been cracked after seven years

We may not know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, but at least it’s a mystery we think we can solve.

By MICHAEL KAPILKOV

Translated by: Zion Editor: Rose

Last week, Cointelegraph reported on the latest findings of Sergio Dermain Lerner, who is famous for discovering the so-called “Patoshi Pattern.” His latest research suggests that Satoshi Nakamoto may have used a single personal computer to mine approximately 1.1 million Bitcoins (BTC). However, it seems that something more important is missing in this exciting discovery. If Lerner’s latest findings are accurate, it will end seven years of speculation about the meaning behind this mysterious pattern.

Patoshi Pattern Source: Sergio Darmain Lerner’s blog

Lerner first wrote about the mysterious Bitcoin mining pattern in March 2013. Some privacy vulnerabilities in the Bitcoin source code allowed him to discover Satoshi's mining idiosyncrasies. The key to the pattern is that Satoshi's mining code increments the ExtraNonce field differently than the default Bitcoin code. A few months ago, Lerner also believed that Satoshi did not mine within the first five minutes of a block. This led to increasing speculation about the meaning behind the pattern.

Some believe that Satoshi was intentionally “marking” their Bitcoins. Others say it was a way for Satoshi’s team to divide up their wealth. Some speculate that Satoshi optimized their equipment or code so that they could mine faster than anyone else. Still others believe that the pattern stems from Satoshi using around 50 machines for mining. The latter theory may have given Craig Wright the idea to claim that he used a Bitcoin farm in Australia to mine his Bitcoins.

However, the truth seems less exciting, but sounds more plausible. Satoshi was using a multi-threaded computer to mine. (Lerner also suggests to us that Satoshi may have used a "field programmable gate array," which is apparently consistent with Satoshi's "previously invented" GPU mining and would not affect these conclusions.) To avoid redundancy, Satoshi restricted each thread to a unique, non-overlapping random number space. During Bitcoin mining, the random number increases with each failed attempt to solve the hash puzzle. Therefore, this mysterious pattern may not have been created voluntarily, but rather was a side effect of Satoshi's unique mining rig. Lerner agrees with this conclusion, which has the potential to put this theory to rest once and for all.