On September 3, 2013, Sergio Demian Lerner published “A New Mystery about Satoshi Hidden in the Bitcoin Block-Chain,” revealing a second, independent fingerprint in Satoshi’s early mining — beyond the ExtraNonce slope analysis he had published five months earlier.
The discovery
Lerner analyzed the least significant byte (LSB) of nonce values across the first 36,288 blocks. In a standard mining implementation, nonce bytes should be uniformly distributed. Instead, Satoshi’s blocks showed a striking non-random pattern:
- Values 0–9: Elevated frequency (247–324 occurrences each)
- Values 10–18: Near-zero frequency (only 2–6 each) — a critical gap
- Values 19–58: Elevated again (up to 201 occurrences)
- Values 59–255: Sparse distribution
The pattern was exclusive to unspent coinbases (Satoshi’s blocks) and absent from blocks mined by other early participants.
Significance
This LSB restriction to approximately 50 out of 256 possible values ([0..9] ∪ [19..58]) was a completely independent line of evidence from the ExtraNonce analysis. It proved the dominant miner used custom software that partitioned the nonce search space — assigning different LSB ranges to different threads or processes to avoid duplicate work.
Initial hypotheses
Lerner proposed four explanations: a parsing error, specialized hardware using gray codes, a SHA-2 vulnerability, or an intentional fingerprint. Community member “Eyal0” quickly proposed the correct answer: Satoshi ran approximately 50 parallel mining threads, each assigned unique LSB identifiers to prevent nonce collision.
Follow-up (September 4, 2013)
In “Satoshi’s Machine,” Lerner confirmed the LSB-ExtraNonce connection and determined that Satoshi’s computer appeared approximately 4.3 times faster than any other early miner’s machine — consistent with a single high-end CPU running dozens of parallel threads rather than multiple networked computers.
Lerner noted:
“We’re living in a LOST movie: each time it looks a mystery is solved, another one appears.”
This nonce-LSB discovery is treated as a methodological pivot in two later Lerner readings. The 2013 Patoshi-pattern analysis reads this discovery as the technical refinement that converted the ExtraNonce pattern into a stronger nonce-level signature. The 2019 Patoshi-naming entry treats this LSB discovery as one of the methodological additions that converted Lerner’s empirical observation into the near-certainty named “Patoshi.”
Lerner returned to the hardware question at length in the 2020 Patoshi mining-machine analysis, whose re-mining simulation confirmed the single-CPU, five-thread configuration that the nonce-partitioning pattern discovered here implies.