Whale Alert, an expert in interesting blockchain transactions, provides the most accurate estimate of the bitcoins owned by Satoshi Nakamoto.

Satoshi N. mined 1,125,150 bitcoin up to block 54,316 with an estimated total value of the unspent bitcoin of at least $ 10.9 billion in today’s market

Extensive analysis focused on the recognition of mining activity through extranonce values.

Satoshi Pattern

In the image above, you can see the extranonce values at a block heights below 20,000, each block creating a saw like pattern. The analyst assigned almost vertical lines to Satoshi, because his pattern appeared as soon as the network was fully created, and the bitcoins were sent to Hal Finney.

Whale Alert also found other evidence, specifically:

the last byte of the nonce was always within the ranges of 0 to 9 or 19 to 58 whereas all other miners used the full range of 0 to 255.

This discovery made it easier to attribute blocks to Patoshi by removing the ones with nonces outside of the range.

Other interesting findings include the revelation of the average speed of Satoshi’s mining, which was constant throughout. According to the information obtained, Satoshi adjusted the speed between the blocks to maintain a certain average.

The ranges for the Satoshi nonce endings per block period

for the entire range of blocks between height 2,000 and 16,000 the average number of blocks mined by Patoshi per hour was almost exactly .6 per 10 minutes,

According to Whale Alert, there can be two reasons for this:

  • maintaining a constant 60% processing power to avoid attacks for a growing network
  • finding that the ideal block time was around 10 minutes

We suspect that Patoshi was comprised of at least 48 computers, with one machine for coordination and more on standby in case of an attack, which would explain the missing range of [10–18].

As soon as Satoshi deemed the network strong enough he reduced Patoshi’s blocks per 10 min target to give others a better chance at mining a block.

Although the research is extensive and precise, even the creator himself cannot confirm with certainty that Satoshi stopped mining after block 54,316, and therefore we only have to argue about whether we have at least partially approached reality.

Read also: The discovered e-mail from 1999 was probably written by Satoshi Nakamoto

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