A new analysis made by Whale Alert suggests that Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, has mined by himself an estimated 1,125,150 Bitcoins, now valued at around $10.9 billion. In a post on Medium, the researches explained how Satoshi was mining with the same platform until May 2010.
It is important to note, that Whale Alert used the findings of the so-called “extra nonce” technique, developed by Sergio Demian Lerner in 2013. It claims that Nakamoto’s stash amounts to around 1 million Bitcoins. He also named the mining pattern of Satoshi the “Patoshi” pattern.
The analytical work of the researches helped identify a set of nonce patterns related to the Patoshi set. This way additional blocks possibly mined by the Japanese creator have been added to the pile.
According to Whale Alert, 22,503 out of the initial 54,316 blocks have been mined by Satoshi using his new methodology.
It is believed that Satoshi wanted to maintain a perpetual mining scheme in the initial stages of the network development in order to protect it from 51% attacks.
The claim that nonce patterns are related to certain mining rigs has been called into question in 2018 by BitMEX Research. They suggest that Satoshi mined by himself no more than 700,000 Bitcoins.
