Golden Observation | Hardcore interpretation of why Satoshi Nakamoto is not moving Bitcoin

Bitcoin block 631058 included a transaction that spent bitcoins mined in February 2009, just a month after the Bitcoin network launched. This sparked price volatility, not to mention a lot of speculation as to whether it was Satoshi moving the coins.

This article will explain why it is very likely that Satoshi is not moving bitcoins, and some mathematical evidence for this conclusion.

On May 20, 2020, the transaction with the transaction ID cb1440c787d8a46977886405a34da89939e1b04907f567bf182ef27ce53a8d71 was broadcast to the Bitcoin network and packaged in block 631058. The input of this transaction comes from the coinbase transaction of block 3654, which was dug around February 9, 2009. The Bitcoin Genesis block was on January 3, 2009, and February 9, 2009 was only 37 days before the Bitcoin network started operating.

At that time, not many people were mining Bitcoin, and no one even knew what Bitcoin was, so it was speculated that the transfer may have come from Satoshi Nakamoto. Given that a private key is required to unlock an output, the fact that this output is spent indicates that the person who initiated the transaction possesses the private key. If this bitcoin had been moved by Satoshi, more bitcoins could have been sold. So the bitcoin price fell about 5%, perhaps based on this speculation.

Golden Morning | Overview of important overnight news on July 23: 21:00-7:00 Keywords: Cryptocurrency Custody, Blockchain Amendment, Russian Act

1. U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency: National savings banks can provide cryptocurrency custody services.

2. The U.S. House of Representatives added two blockchain amendments to the annual defense spending bill.

3. The Russian legislature passed the Digital Financial Assets Act and agreed to give legal status to digital assets.

4. The Ningbo cross-border financial blockchain service platform has handled more than 11,000 transactions in total.

5. Shenzhen Longhua District and Tencent jointly build an industrial blockchain alliance.

6. Tether issued an additional 120 million USDT on the TRON network (authorized but not issued).

7. The CME Bitcoin futures July contract closed up 0.32%.

8. Professor of Law at Georgetown University: The central bank can issue CBDC in a variety of ways.

9. Bitcoin continued to rise, with an intraday high of $9,530.56 and an intraday low of $9,326.42. [2020/7/23]

Bitcoin can be traced as far back as approximately February 2009. At that time, very few people knew about Bitcoin, and most of the people who knew about Bitcoin came from the cypherpunk mailing list, and most of the people who participated in mining on the cypherpunk mailing list did so because they thought it was an interesting experiment. At that time, there were no transactions on the network other than Coinbase transactions, because people had no one around to send bitcoins to. A notable exception is block 170, where Satoshi sent 10 bitcoins to Hal Finney using the bitcoins mined in block 9.

Analysis | Golden disk: BTC/USD 4-hour divergence and rebound: Golden disk comprehensive analysis: BTC/USD 4-hour K-line chart shows that after the previous K-line formed a buy signal, the market’s long sentiment began to recover, and the midline buy The market has increased significantly, and the short-term surge has risen slightly, but the market has just recovered, and the increase in trading volume is not obvious enough. Now we should pay attention to the risk of retracement. [2018/8/15]

So we know for sure that at least block 9 was mined by Satoshi Nakamoto, and possibly more. That said, there are others mining on the network, not the least of which is Hal Finney:

Because Bitcoin was so new and there was only one software option, everyone running the Bitcoin software was mining.

Because everyone running the bitcoin software was mining at the time, there were very few transactions at the time that weren't coinbase transactions, so we can try to pull some information together based on the code in bitcoin v0.1.

Analysis | Golden disk: QTUM/USD rises rapidly: Comprehensive analysis of the golden disk: QTUM/USD rises rapidly in the short term, touching the upper track of the previous downward channel, the first pressure level is 4.4, and the second pressure level is 4.57. Pay attention to the risk of callback. [2018/8/15]

Back in v0.1 of the Bitcoin software, there is a specific function in main.cpp that creates a proof of work. Sure, doing proof-of-work is pretty easy by today's standards, but doing it in the early days still required a lot of CPU power. We can see the code to create the coinbase transaction here.

In addition to the output, the key piece of information we can gather in a coinbase transaction is the so-called extra nonce:

It can be seen in line 2190 that bnExtraNonce is set to 0. In line 2212, the same variable is incremented in a while loop to produce bitcoins (this process is also known as mining). Finally, also on line 2212, the bnExtraNonce is added to the scriptSig of the coinbase transaction via the "<<" operator. Here we can use some forensics as this variable is set to 0 and incremented as long as the program is running. It is reset to 0 if the program is restarted. So the longer the bitcoin software has been running, the higher this number will be, and this number will also show up in the scriptSig field of the coinbase transaction, which we can check on the blockchain.

Jinse Finance reported on the spot that Sun Jian, the founder of Jiuding Blockchain Laboratory: the future will be the competition between legal currency and digital currency: Sun Jian, the founder of Jiuding Blockchain Laboratory, said at the third China Equity Transfer Forum that the financial industry has always been There are contradictions. In the past, the financial system was divided into reformists and conservatives. Currently, it is the confrontation between the middle-aged and the young. In the future, there will be competition between legal currency and digital currency. [2018/4/13]

Based on this, Sergio Lerner marked some early Bitcoin coinbase transactions as "Patoshi". The bitcoin in the figure is green if it has been spent, and blue if it has not been spent. The y-axis is an additional random number, and you will see a long blue line:

These bitcoins are suspected to have been mined by Satoshi Nakamoto, because additional random numbers will increase with the output of the block. These are also very long running processes that seem to restart every week or so. To be fair, we don't know if these bitcoins are Satoshi's bitcoins, except for block 9 or something, but given the pattern of the blue lines, when one line ends, another begins very quickly , so there is strong evidence that these Bitcoin coinbase outputs belong to Satoshi Nakamoto.

Block 3654 specifically its coinbase transaction, we can look at scriptSig to find the extra nonce:

scriptSig is a 4-byte number of bits (bits number), and the threshold for proof of work is 0xffff001d. Then there is the extra random number, which is 0xdd01. The number (dd01) is in little-endian hexadecimal form, and (01dd) converts to a decimal value of 477.

The blocks before and after block 3654 are 3653 and 3655 respectively, which are in the blue line and contain additional random numbers 2367 and 2372 respectively.

Of course, it is possible for Satoshi Nakamoto to run Bitcoin on multiple computers, and block 3654 comes from another computer, so it is not on the same blue line as blocks 3653 and 3655 (Jin Finance Note: Sergio research believes that Satoshi Nakamoto is single computer mining). But given the clear blue pattern of all unspent bitcoins, it seems likely that the person who moved block 3654 was not Satoshi Nakamoto, who owns nearly a million bitcoins.

Jinse Finance Note: In addition, the movement of 50 bitcoins in the address 17XiVVooLcdCUCMf9s4t4jTExacxwFS5uh on May 20 also denied Satoshi Aomoto as Satoshi Nakamoto again, because Satoshi Aomoto claimed to own this address in a document submitted to the court, but Ao Bencong denied today that he moved 50 bitcoins in the 17XiVVooLcdCUCMf9s4t4jTExacxwFS5uh address.

This article is compiled from the latest article of "Programming Bitcoin" author Jimmy Song Why Satoshi (probably) didn’t move some coins from 2009

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