New research from IOV Head of Innovation and RSK designer Sergio Demian Lerner reveals that an early miner on the Bitcoin network used a special algorithm to give him/her a leg up.
While it cannot be proven, many think this early miner – code-named Patoshi – is Bitcoin’s creator, who went by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Lerner’s research raises questions about Nakamoto’s motivations – often looked to as a beneficent and ideologically driven coder.
If we take for granted that Patoshi is, in fact, Satoshi, then it’s conceivable that Bitcoin’s creator used this advantage to prevent mining attacks on the nascent network,” CoinDesk’s Colin Harper reports.
While the “Patoshi pattern” has been known for years, Lerner has discovered the mechanics behind it. He now thinks Patoshi likely used multi-threading, a way to boost a CPU to sweep for multiple nonces at once, at a time when other miners were unaware of this solution.
While this means Patoshi mined significantly more blocks than other miners in the early days – the total hoard is estimated to be 1.1 million BTC – Lerner thinks it was a strategy to keep the nascent system alive. Multithreading could pick up the slack when blocks were not being mined on schedule, and dialed down when the system functioned properly.
In June, Lerner pointed out that Patoshi “reduced his hashrate in several steps during the first year” and that it’s likely he turned off his miner for five-minute intervals each time he mined a new block.
Patoshi took these measures, Lerner posits, to foster healthy competition and to make sure he didn’t hog all the new blocks.
The research on how Patoshi proceeded to decentralize Bitcoin taught me a lot about ideals,” Lerner said. “The first Bitcoiners were believers who cared a lot less about money that we all care now. Most of them mined to help the project see how far it could grow against all odds. Most of them donated bitcoins, received and paid with bitcoin to show its potential and never bother to speculate. Some of them mined just for fun