A new research paper by RSK chief scientist Sergio Demian Lerner sheds light on how Satoshi Nakamoto mined Bitcoin’s earliest blocks. Titled “The Patoshi Mining Machine,” the study uses a re-mining simulation to argue that the pseudonymous creator used only one high-end personal computer to generate approximately 1.1 million bitcoins.
Simulating Satoshi’s Mining Setup
Lerner has been investigating Satoshi’s mining patterns since 2013. In his latest work, he simulated the mining process by scanning the nonce space of early blocks. The re-mining revealed a consistent tendency for the Patoshi miner to select higher nonces, indicating a decrementing nonce — the opposite of what the Bitcoin 0.1 client did. This behavior strongly suggests a single machine with multi-threading, not a distributed farm.
Further analysis of nonce imbalance across five subranges showed that when combined, the imbalance decreased. This points to parallel scanning of subranges on the same CPU, contradicting the theory that Satoshi used 50 independent computers. “This supports the theory that Patoshi was simply multi-threading in a high-end CPU,” Lerner wrote.
How Many Bitcoins Did Satoshi Own?
Estimates have varied: Lerner’s earlier work suggested 1.1 million BTC; BitMEX Research estimated 700,000 in 2018; Whale Alert put the figure at 1,125,150 in July 2020. The new study does not resolve the exact number but reinforces the single-machine hypothesis. Lerner noted that he first attempted re-mining in 2014 but shelved the idea until this year, when he re-mined the first 18,000 blocks with a standard CPU to confirm his theory.
The finding adds a fresh technical clue to the ongoing search for Satoshi’s identity. It paints a picture of a lone inventor who kick-started the Bitcoin network using sophisticated algorithms on an ordinary personal computer — not a massive mining operation.