Bitquery reconstructs Patoshi pattern, tracing up to 1.17 million BTC to Bitcoin's earliest miner

Somewhere between 900,000 and 1.17 million Bitcoin sit in wallets that haven't budged in years. And there's a decent chance they belong to the person who invented the entire network.

Bitquery, a blockchain data analytics firm, has published a comprehensive reconstruction of the so-called Patoshi mining pattern, the on-chain fingerprint first identified by researcher Sergio Demian Lerner back in 2013. The new analysis confirms what the crypto world has long suspected: a single mining entity dominated Bitcoin's earliest days and accumulated a staggering fortune that remains almost entirely untouched.

The Patoshi pattern gets its name from a portmanteau of "pattern" and "Satoshi." It refers to a distinctive signature found in Bitcoin's coinbase transactions, the special transactions that reward miners for adding new blocks to the chain. The pattern's origins stem from an unintended privacy flaw in Bitcoin's original software, where sequences in coinbase transactions produced detectable patterns — specifically, tightly controlled nonce values that stood out from every other miner's output.

Bitquery's analysis covered the first 54,316 blocks ever mined. Within that dataset, the firm identified approximately 22,000 to 23,500 blocks attributable to a single entity. That's roughly 22% of those early blocks, a lopsided share that suggests this miner was running custom mining software while most other participants were using off-the-shelf tools.