Since yesterday, my post was read 30k times in just one day. So a lot of people started asking me how precise was my analysis, since I had estimated the figure just by looking at the graph. People want a more rigorous analysis. Today I carefully masked all blocks that were not part of Satoshi mining pattern segments, leaving only the ones that belong to Satoshi (or the entity I’ve associated with him). I also extended the analysis of spent coinbases to the whole blockchain up to 20-april-2013.

Here is a graph of all blocks from 0 to 50000. Black dots are unspent coinbases that are part of the Satoshi mining pattern. Red dots are spent coinbases. Yellow dots are unspent coinbases that are not part of any segment of the Satoshi mining pattern. Click in the image to enlarge. Note that this image has been compressed and it is not in “1 block=1 pixel” scale, so it’s not usefull as source to a pixel counting function.

Having masked all blocks not in Satoshi pattern I could count the number of block in the pattern, which are 19600 blocks, or 980K BTC, or 132M USD at current exchange rate. Since masking was done by hand, “dot per dot” I may have missed a few, and also some cannot be ruled neither out of nor in the pattern. So the value I’ve given has an error of about 0.1%, at most.

Another interesting fact is that the pattern starts just after the genesis block, in block 1. Here is an image containing the first 15 blocks. The dots are labeled (x,y), where x is the block number and y is the extraNonce value. It seems that block 12 is the first mined by another user.

I really don’t want to dig more into Satoshi’s Fortune. I have nothing but gratitude for him. In the following posts I will analyze the mystery behind Satoshi’s computer performance. Also I plan to extend the extraNonce analysis to mining in the period 2010-2013, which is quite more technically challenging.

You can follow me realtime on twitter at @ SDLerner

(I almost never retweet and I only tweet when I have something to say)

Happy data mining!