On-chain forensics · reproducible · 2026-07-22

The verifiable footprint of the original Satoshi

Every figure below re-derives from the Bitcoin chain itself — a synced node, or the public bigquery-public-data.crypto_bitcoin mirror. Nothing rests on the word “Satoshi” in anyone’s mouth.

≈1.13MBTC

~22,540 coinbase blocks, one miner

forensically attributed — the Patoshi cluster

dormant 15+ years, not a single signature

Grade: [forensic], never [cryptographic]. A fingerprint, not a key.

Epistemics

Three tiers of certainty, never blurred.

A · DEFINITIONAL

The genesis block

Height 0, hardcoded in consensus: the Times 03/Jan/2009 headline, and 50 BTC to 1A1zP1eP…DivfNa that the software can never spend.

certain — it is the chain’s first constant

B · FORENSIC

The Patoshi cluster

One dominant early miner, fingerprinted by structure its software leaked into every header (Lerner 2013). ~22.5k of the first ~54k blocks; ≈1.13M BTC; still unspent.

statistical, not cryptographic — a fingerprint, not a signature

C · ATTESTED

Block 170 → Hal Finney

Satoshi sends 10 BTC to Finney, spending block 9’s Patoshi coinbase. On-chain-certain that the coin moved; “it was Satoshi” rests on tier B plus Finney’s own account.

on-chain certain that block 9’s coinbase was spent to Finney

The evidence

What the chain says — and it lands on Lerner.

Reproduced from a full pull of blocks 0–60,000. The nonce’s low byte is confined to a Patoshi-specific range; the ExtraNonce leaves a machine-like trail. Three independent numbers fall out — and match the canonical 2013 analysis.

Quantity	Measured here	Lerner (2013)
Patoshi blocks (refined)	22,540	~22,000	match
Attributed coins	~1,126,974	~1,100,000	match
Era end (miner exits)	block 54,458	~54,000	match
Raw nonce-LSB pass (upper bound)	28,774	—

ExtraNonce vs block height scatter showing sawtooth Patoshi tracks — **The fingerprint.** Each sawtooth ramp is Satoshi’s single machine rebuilding its block template on a fixed cadence — ExtraNonce climbing, resetting, climbing. The steep lone diagonals rising to 8k–13k are *other* miners. The tracks are visible by eye.

Rolling nonce-LSB pass-rate declining from 97% to the 19.5% baseline near block 54,000 — **The exit.** The nonce-LSB pass-rate starts at ~97% (Satoshi mining nearly alone), holds ~80% through block 16k, then decays as others arrive — collapsing to the 19.5% chance baseline at ~54,000. That collapse is Satoshi stepping away, late 2010.

Refinement

Removing the chance-passers — and checking the answer against a signal the method never saw.

The nonce test is a necessary condition: ~19.5% of ordinary blocks pass it by luck, so the raw 28,774 over-counts. Two independent estimators strip the luck out — and land one block apart.

Patoshi intensity phi(h) decaying from 0.94 to zero at the era end — **The area is the count.** φ(h) — the fraction of blocks near height h that are Patoshi — falls from ~94% to zero at the era end. Its integral, **22,539 blocks**, agrees to within one block with the closed-form excess-over-chance estimate (**22,540**).

Dormancy validation. If the labels are real, confirmed-Patoshi coins should sit unspent while the discarded chance-passers spend at ordinary rates. The classifier reads only block headers — it cannot see spends — so this agreement is corroboration, not circularity.

Confirmed Patoshi6.2%

Discarded chance-passers42.5%

Background (ordinary miners)86.7%

Spend rate by population. Confirmed-Patoshi is 14× more dormant than background, 6.9× more than the discarded set — ordered exactly as the labels predict. (The residual 6.2% is genuine early Satoshi test-spends, block 9 → Finney among them, plus a little boundary contamination. It isn’t zero, and we don’t pretend it is.)

The judge

Is this coin Satoshi’s?

A Patoshi coin is a coinbase output, so a spend consumes it directly — resolve any “old wallet just moved” event back to its coinbase block and get a verdict. Every case below is the tool’s real output.

block 0GENESIS50 BTC, permanently unspendable — Satoshi’s by construction.

block 1PATOSHIDormant (φ 0.94). If it ever moves, the first cluster spend in 15+ years.

block 9PATOSHI · SPENTThe historic one — spent to Hal Finney in block 170. Genuine Satoshi movement.

block 12NOT PATOSHIDormant, but nonce LSB = 63 (out of range). Dormant ≠ Satoshi.

block 54455AMBIGUOUSφ 0.05 — the honest 50/50 zone near the exit. Not attributable per-block.

This is exactly what shows the 2025–26 250-BTC and 2,000-BTC awakenings were not Satoshi — and what would flag it instantly, unambiguously, if the real cluster ever stirred.

The line

No genesis-era or Patoshi key has ever produced a verifying signature. Only that would turn attributable into proven. The ≈1.13M BTC staying silent for fifteen years is itself the strongest statement: the keys don’t speak — and no impostor can make them.

Cross-check with the quantum threat model: these ~1.13M dormant Patoshi coins are bare P2PK outputs — a subset of the ~1.7–1.9M BTC of standing exposed-public-key value on Bitcoin (public estimates, e.g. Glassnode's structural figure). A large share of the single most quantum-exposed coin class is one dormant miner.