Topic: Chain Archaeology - Answers from the early blockchain - page 2. (Read 9155 times)

There were probably a LOT of people who simply deleted those keys out of disinterest at some point.
See this chart. Blocks from 150 to 250 are pretty much exclusively unspent.
Meanwhile blocks from 300 to 500 (not including satoshi's coins) are almost all spent.
Coincidence? Maybe. It's still pretty much all ciherpunks at this point, but there might be a new crowd already on day three. I'm not sure what to think, seeing all these blocks going from being all unspent to being all spent.
Maybe it's because it's a smart few (draw the lines), rather than the 150-250 area which is what looks like a dozen people.

Makes me think most early adopters probably lost their privkeys(aka deleted their wallets) long before they realized the true worth of Bitcoins.

Starting a new post. It's getting crowded up there.
I have fancy-ified the chart, and I've done my best to separate satoshi's pattern.
Below are blocks up to 400, after going through and more thoroughly finding spent blocks.

Edit. Fullrender up to block 500:

Edit... That was incomplete data. Whoops.

Edit. Blocks 407, 413 and 417 are spent.

Edit. Block 419 is spent.

Edit. Blocks 433, 439, 461, 463, 465, 473, 490, 493 and 501 are spent.

Edit. Proper fullrender up to 500:


Edit. Shrank points for readability:


Edit. Time to make some connections and identify who mined our spent blocks.
I'll continue updating this section rather than reposting it constantly (unless someone replies to this thread.)

009 Satoshi
078 Hal
235 Bgo*
268 Vaga*
309 Druid
317 (Moved to single addy)
320 Druid
329 Druid
357 Druid
360 BBz*
361 Yogbaf*
372
394
407
413
417 Vaga*
419
431 Vaga*
433
439
442 Vaga*
450 Vaga*
461
463
465
473
490
493
501

Blocks 9 78 268 309 320 357 417 431 442 and 450 identified to this point.
*Pseudonyms. Names invented by me, based on the conjuncted coin's addresses.

Edit.
Block 235's coins were spent in conjunction with the reward from block 8,970 to 1BgoUL3Mf8vDSDU4jjpFARKBJ6zPDpa4RU. Pseudonym will be Bgo for now.
Block 317's coins were moved to a single 50BTC address, 1QKJnFPvRoZ7avBhxqwxhsEv62JWYoB1R9.

Edit.
Block 329's coins were cut in half, some sent to 1LEWwJkDj8xriE87ALzQYcHjTmD8aqDj1f and the rest returned to the gen addy as change. The change is later spent to 12higDjoCCNXSA95xZMWUdPvXNmkAduhWv, meaning they're Druid's coins.
Block 360's coins were sent to 1BBz9Z15YpELQ4QP5sEKb1SwxkcmPb5TMs in conjunction with 11 coins that originated in block 9, sent around the time satoshi sent 10 coins to Hal in block 170. Since this person has a relationship with satoshi, I'll assign the pseudonym BBz.
Block 361's coins were spent to 16ds1vC8yuFkYogbafQjMJZXYsC4xbXdEX in 2011, along with an asston of other generation outputs totalling 2,000 BTC. We might be able to find their owner but it won't be easy to trace the coins. For now the pseudonym Yogbaf from the addy will have to do.

Those three blocks mined by other users were probably just lucky values.
In fact, I'd say they were without any chance of doubt lucky values.


Continuation of research:

I've drawn some sample lines onto the chart.
There ARE some patterns sticking out. Were these blocks found by the same computer?

Also, |)ruid's second block, compared to his first, is sloped like satoshi's extraNonce, but obviously less frequent. I've highlighted them with a yellow line.
Until we see more of his blocks I won't draw any conclusions.
The spent block inbetween |)ruid's blocks, if I remember correctly, was sent to another address and then left there to this day. Can't be |)ruid's.

The purple lines in the bottom right of the chart are very clear. Looks like we've found two early adopters.
The cyan line connects five blocks that were all spent to the same address.

Edit. Looking at the 'jumbled mess of blocks'

There's  not really any conclusions to be drawn from this. Not even leads. Maybe if we have more information... Like another factor...

Edit. I missed block 360 it seems. It's spent.
It is not compliant to satoshi's pattern, but whoever mined it must have known satoshi, for they also owned 11 BTC from block 9.
COULD be Hal. He got another 10 BTC from block 9, and the remaining 29 BTC of block 9 are locked up across a few addresses since 2009.
Not saying it's Hal. I'll investigate.

Edit. It isn't Hal; he'd have spent the coins. They're lodged in 1BBz9Z15YpELQ4QP5sEKb1SwxkcmPb5TMs at the moment.
Our only chance of identifying their owner is through historical conversations.

Edit. March 15. Block 329 is spent.

Edit. Block 357 is spent. Traced to |)ruid.

Edit. Block 361 is spent. Looks like it's Hal's, but not sure yet.

Edit. Block 372 is spent.

Edit. Block 394 is spent.

The nonce is a random value tried to find a hash that < target. So yeah, nonce at this point is random(you may increase it sequentially, but finding blocks with some nonce is still random).

After further investigation,
the nonce factor seems totally redundant at this point.
Back to extraNonce only for now.

I thought it'd be interesting to note that block 167's nonce is 3,735,299 units larger than block 168's. That's the closest consecutive number I've ever seen, but maybe it's not as rare as I think it is.

Oh, and happy block 290,000. That's a lot of blocks.

This is news to me. Satoshi only spent the coins from block 9? I've got to see where they all went for myself.
It's also a good thing for the press. People might think twice about calling ponzi after they hear the one who started it made no money from it.
I could never want to put someone through what Dorian is going through. I'll remember not to make myself.
Chain-archaeology.
I'm going to use this term.

Edit, I forgot to ask you something:
You have data for which blocks are spent, right?
See, currently I'm manually parsing blockexplorer click by click to know.
I mean... If you could share which ones are spent, that'd be golden

I'm trying to connect the normal nonce of a block to blocks we know were not mined by satoshi.
This is probably redundant. But I want to analyze everything.






See blocks 12, 64 and 78.
We know all three were mined by people other than satoshi.
The block's nonces are all less than 500,000,000.

I don't think this is related (it might be but I doubt it), though I'll leave this here for completion.
I'll look at some more blocks we know satoshi didn't mine.

Oh, and it's important to note some of the blocks satoshi DID mine have nonces below 500,000,000. Another reason why I think this is a bit redundant... BUT NO DATA LEFT BEHIND!

I believe Sergio (the author of the post directly above yours) wrote an article with that as a possible thesis.




Sergio, you are an inspiration. I'm going to plot some more factors tonight and look for some patterns. Deathandtaxes's resolution on the qt's extranonce has me wanting to separate as many candidates as possible.
I'll draw some lines. Maybe for that we should plot on time, rather than block height...

Wasn't Satoshi shortly after release mining on 6 different computers parallel?
I thought I read that somewhere.

As I researched some time ago "Satoshi" pattern has a distinctive restricted nonce LSB range, and that's the reason why we see Satoshi pattern to be steeper than the other patterns. But also the pattern is more dense than it is expected, meaning the computer had several threads working on the same ExtraNonce incremental sequence, which suggests something like a special mining rig consisting on a master thread managing 5 child dumb threads, in a quad-core computer.

Regarding having access to the private keys, we know that the generated coins in block 9 (which seems to be part of the pattern) were used to pay for Hal's transaction. I inspected the pattern by eyesight and concluded that never again the coinbase of a block from the Satoshi pattern was spent. For me, this is a clear indication that he wasn't going to use that coins to manipulate the market or he purposely destroyed the keys to access the coins.

After all this media circus we've seen this week regarding his real identity, I suggest we take into account people's privacy. We researchers also make mistakes.
My own research was motivated by the need to understand the market in order to decide if I should invest in Bitcoin or not. And from that day I know that I should have invested more.

Have a nice chain-archeology day...
Sergio.

I enjoyed the pointers on the screenshot

Maybe this will help…


https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/
https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/more-on-block-mining-history-1st-half-of-2010/
https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/satoshi-s-fortune-a-more-accurate-figure/
https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/new-mystery-about-satoshi/

That is my understanding.  Even w/ all Satoshi's hashpower the entire network didn't have enough hashrate to sustain 10 minutes per block @ difficulty 1.  The average time between blocks in the first year was closer to 14 minutes.


Possibly although the original miner never stored the extranonce to disk so a miner shutting down (reboot, needing computing resources) would reset back to an extra nonce of zero.


IIRC Hal reported his first block was 78 but it is possible he was mistaken and that entire chain is his?  Also the overlap could simply be coincidence.  Hal mined through 78 extra nonces before solving a block.  His block is unrelated to another miner who solved the earlier blocks w/ lower extra nonce value.  I don't know just throwing ideas out there.

One thing to understand is that the early miner was very conservative with use of extra nonce.  Technically on any block change you could reset the extra nonce as the rest of the header has changed but the software didn't.  It simply incremented the extra nonce on every nonce range attempted.

They were
https://blockchain.info/tx/4d6edbeb62735d45ff1565385a8b0045f066055c9425e21540ea7a8060f08bf2
So, satoshi wasn't a special case; He just had a lot more power than everyone else it seems.

If all the early blocks are incremental we may be able to draw a lot of lines, not just for satoshi but for all identifiable early miners.
What still confuses me is the blocks in the 70s range. Hal mined 78. It appears to be at the end of a chain of incremental extra nonces, but Hal didn't mine those. I'll look into it.

Your evidence that Satoshi had a higher hashrate does make sense and support the "blind miner" theory. Satoshi didn't refer to hash rates in the white paper so much as CPU power (See abstract in: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf ) so this definitely lines up with him running more than one system. And it would make sense he had a daemon process running somewhere to ensure every 10 minutes a block was found and transactions processed, leaving him free to work on and run other instances on demand as he was developing and testing the software for all we know the "unknown" was also Satoshi experimenting with other approaches.

Interesting work, keep it up.

Regarding the extra nonce the early mining code always incremented the extra nonce until the application is restarted (in hindsight it would have been better to use a random number).  You can find this is the earliest copies of the bitcon software (which still had mining integrated in the client, you were always mining when the client was running). 

So all miners will show an incrementing extra nonce.  However the lower the particular hashrate of a given miner the less steep the slope. For example in the graph immediately above you will see that the red blocks between 400 and 450 were probably all from the same miner.  Even the utterly "random" blocks by unaligned solo miners are using incrementing nonces however if they have a very low hashrate and/or restarted frequently they would never operate long enough (measured in hashes) to find a block with a large extra nonce. 

This seems to be a bunch of random anons. It's wholly possible satoshi stopped mining during this time. There's no pattern whatsoever.

Edit. Looking at the big picture:

The giant leaning towers of pisa are one blind miner, which we are still speculating to be satoshi.
The other blocks down below were early adopters; solo miners.
The four spent blocks on the far right were all mined by the same entity, which I refer to as Vaga.
The extraNonce is incremental. Maybe it's not a pattern exclusive to satoshi? Or it's blind luck.
We are going to need more information to come to a conclusion.

I'm trying to determine:
1) Who mined early blocks, for historical purposes
2) Just how many bitcoins Satoshi has
3) The behavior of the network in 2009

What do you hope to achieve by this?