The re-mining simulation shows that Satoshi used a single high-end PC to mine 1.1 million bitcoins

Cryptocurrency advocates recently discussed the mysterious Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto as RSK chief scientist Sergio Demian Lerner published a paper called “The Patoshi Mining Machine”. Essentially, Lerner simulated Satoshi’s mining experience. The results estimate that the creator of Bitcoin used a single computer to mine around 1 million bitcoins minted in the early days.

Sergio Demian Lerner is well known for publishing one of the first estimates backed by technical data in 2013 on Satoshi Nakamoto’s alleged bitcoin stash.

Over the past seven years, Lerner has published a few more articles on this topic and Satoshi is estimated to have mined 1.1 million BTC. Not long ago, in 2018, Bitmex Research published results that Satoshi may have only mined 700,000 BTC.

In late July 2020, blockchain trackers and Whale Alert researchers released a new research report placing the figure at around 1,125,150 BTC.

Lerner’s latest article “The Patoshi Mining Machine” examines whether the Patoshi model (Satoshi’s mining) was performed by multiple computers or by a single PC. Lerner simulated Satoshi’s mining experience by “extracting much of Patoshi’s nonce space by sequentially scanning in the range.”

Chief scientist RSK’s paper noted a trend during re-mining of old Satoshi bocks that reduces the value of the nonce.

“Re-mining was found to reveal a strong tendency for Patoshi’s mining algorithm to choose superior nonce when scanning the internal nonce,” Lerner found. “This trend suggests that the nonce has been decremented, which is the opposite of version 0.1 of the Satoshi client.”

Re-mining has revealed some of the possible solutions chosen by the miner, explained Lerner and “what exists in the blockchain, will be called the real solution”.

The discovery leads Lerner to believe that Satoshi did not use 50 computers to mine the Patoshi blocks and it is very likely that the inventor used a single machine at the time.

Lerner thinks Satoshi may have explored the subsegments in parallel when he looked at decreases in nonce imbalance. “Since the nonce imbalance decreases when analyzing two sub-intervals together, this suggests that Patoshi was analyzing the 5 sub-intervals in parallel, but each sub-interval internally sequentially,” notes Lerner’s paper.

The researcher’s study also adds:

This contradicts the theory that Patoshi implemented the first mining farm of 50 independent computers (or any other highly decoupled system) and supports the theory that Patoshi was simply multi-threading in a high-end CPU.

Lerner claimed to have attempted the re-mining process in 2014, but shelved the idea for several years. The researcher explained that this year he reminisced with “a standard CPU” and reminisced “the first 18K block just to verify that the theory matched reality (it does)”.

In recent years, the search for clues about Satoshi has been a fan favorite and people continue to investigate his past movements and how the inventor started the Bitcoin network.

Lerner’s Patoshi cards have always given credence to a number of theories about the estimated size of Satoshi’s bitcoin stash and how Nakamoto may have operated in the early days.

What do you think of Sergio Demian Lerner re-mining 18,000 blocks to uncover Satoshi’s secrets? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

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