Crypto Global

The patoshi pattern

Jul 28, 2020

There is no more interesting and mysterious topic for Bitcoin than the inventor of Bitcoin, who goes by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.

Just recently, Whale Alert was able to make the most accurate estimate of the number of blocks and bitcoins mined by Satoshi Nakamoto: a total of 1,125,150 Bitcoin, i.e. it was mined up to block 54,316. These have an estimated total value of at least $11 billion in today's marketplace. This knowledge was carried out and derived on the basis of the so-called "Patoshi pattern".

It took years to discover this in the Bitcoin code that led to the discovery of the Patoshi pattern. To make this pattern easier to explain, one needs to understand the technical part of Bitcoin mining a little better:

When mining, you need a nonce value, which can ensure that the useful information, e.g. a transaction, has not been changed. And if you run out of storage space, you have to increase something else, which is called extraNonce. The ExtraNonce field is in the Coinbase transaction and is incremented every time the nonce fields overflow. The pathosi refers to the specific nonce pattern in blocks that was mined in the early days of the Bitcoin network. The pattern is traced back to a bug in the early Bitcoin code that reads as follows:

1. The ExtraNonce acts as a time stamp without being reset to zero between the mined blocks.

2. Based on the original Bitcoin source code, the rate at which a particular miner increases ExtraNonce is much faster than the actual hashrate would display. This miner is known as a patoshi.

The speed of nonce and extraNonce always depends on the computer that is used for mining. If you use a faster computer, you can increment the extraNonce faster. It was found that the extraNonce counter was not reset. So it was a counter that was continued in the sense that every block of a miner generates its time stamp, which thus identifies the speed of a computer.

The Patoshi pattern thus deals with the so-called nonces, an arbitrary number that is used in the Bitcoin algorithm to prove the proof-of-work consensus. And then suddenly another pattern appeared, which perfectly separates the various miners from one another. In short, the Patoshi pattern describes a miner that uses a slightly different mining algorithm. Most believe this is Satoshi Nakamoto.