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Whale Alert Identifies 1.125 Million BTC as Satoshi's Stash

New on-chain analysis from Whale Alert suggests Satoshi Nakamoto mined an estimated 1,125,150 in bitcoin, now worth an estimated $10.9 billion.

By William Foxley
Updated Sep 14, 2021, 9:33 a.m. Published Jul 20, 2020, 5:24 p.m.
(Whale Alert)
(Whale Alert)

New on-chain analysis from Whale Alert says Bitcoin’s anonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto mined an estimated 1,125,150 BTC, now worth an estimated $10.9 billion. In a Medium post, researchers describe how Satoshi continued mining with the same rig until at least May 2010.

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  • Whale Alert based its findings on Sergio Demian Lerner’s 2013 “extra nonce” technique which claimed Satoshi’s stash to be at some 1 million BTC. (Lerner referred to the possible Satoshi mining as the “Patoshi” pattern).
  • Researchers identified a set of nonce patterns more specific to the Patoshi set which helped further isolate possible Satoshi-mined blocks.
  • 22,503 of the first 54,316 blocks were mined by Satoshi under the new method, Whale Alert says.
  • Satoshi maintained a constant mining scheme while the network was growing to protect it from 51% attacks, researchers suggest.
  • The reliability of assuming nonce patterns are specific to certain mining rigs was called into scrutiny by BitMEX Research in 2018. They estimated Satoshi’s haul to be around 700,000 BTC.

Satoshi NakamotoPatoshiwhale-alert
William Foxley

Will Foxley is the host of The Mining Pod and publisher at Blockspace Media. A former co-host of CoinDesk's The Hash, Will was the director of content at Compass Mining and a tech reporter at CoinDesk.

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