Skip the info and show me the graphs
This page was created to help Bitcoiners visualize public information about mining in the early times of Bitcoin. It lets Bitcoiners learn how the network was bootstrapped. Bitcoin had no pre-mine, but as a very innovative technology, the first visionaries mined a large number of bitcoins. The reality is that probably most of those early miners sold their bitcoins during the steep price increments in Bitcoin history. As I think Bitcoin will be the basis of a new, more inclusive financial system, the distribution of Bitcoin wealth is important. However, after a long research, I came to the conclusion that a single miner (that I call Patoshi) accumulated about 1.1M bitcoins during 2009-2010, and paid approximately 550 btc to other people and institutions in the form of donations (those bitcoins were valued around ~5 USD at that time).
The research required generating hypotheses and finding the best possible answers, mathematical modeling and even experiments and simulations. It required several orthogonal arguments, which all support the thesis of a single miner. All the research and findings were published in 2013, 2014 and recently in 2019. You can follow the iterations of hypothesis, dead-ends, back-tracks and proofs by reading my blog here. I recommend you read my last post, which contains a summary of the most relevant findings.
Other researchers have repeated my experiments, achieving similar results(*). You can read their blog posts here :
OrganOfCorti has researched deeper into Satoshi's hashrate. I recommend his posts. From all these research it's evident that this single miner used a special version of the Bitcoin client, and the belief that it is Satoshi rests on public information provided by early adopters who revealed when Satoshi sent them bitcoins and what amounts (some of them also provided e-mails exchanges as proof).
While we may never know if Patoshi was Satoshi, the idea reinforces the theory that Satoshi was not interested in personal monetary gains. Some speculate he/she may have erased the private keys that controlled those bitcoins, and they should be treated as burned.
It is also possible that the community decides in a distant future to effectively remove those coins from potential circulation via a soft-fork. While this is clearly controversial, maybe if 50 years pass without those coins being moved the community agrees to put them aside. If Satoshi wanted to destroy them, but yet the keys still exists today, maybe stored in some encrypted drive, then there exists real a danger of coercion, extortion, theft and/or key brute-forcing. I personally think the keys were destroyed, which I think it was a bad idea: the UTXOs should have been burned before that.
The information in this site should help people understand the benefits and risks of using Bitcoin. This site is just an effort to seek greater transparency in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, while preserving the privacy of the individuals who participated in mining during the early years. It's not intended to justify bashing or supporting any faketoshi out there.
Last, my name is Sergio Demian Lerner. I'm a bitcoiner. I work at IOV Labs. You can find my story here.
I need to put this disclaimer, because who knows where this data can end.DISCLAIMER
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(*) although the exact amount of bitcoins was disputed (~700k instead of ~1.1M).