On September 16, 2022, Jameson Lopp published “Was Satoshi a Greedy Miner?” on his blog, directly challenging the narrative that Bitcoin’s creator selfishly hoarded coins during the network’s early days.
Key data points
- Satoshi mined approximately 1,100,000 BTC (~5% of total supply) across ~22,000 blocks over 14 months
- Maximum hashrate capacity: 6 Mhps — actual observed rate: 4.35 Mhps
- Satoshi controlled >50% of network hashrate but voluntarily decreased mining power in October 2009
- Only 0.09% of Satoshi’s blocks were ever spent
- Fewer than 5 minutes elapsed between Satoshi’s consecutive blocks, suggesting intentional pausing between mining rounds
Counterfactual analysis
Lopp models two alternative scenarios:
- Full capacity (no pauses): Mining continuously at observed 4.35 Mhps would have yielded ~31,783 blocks / ~1.59 million BTC — approximately 1.5× the actual amount
- Maximum capacity: Mining at the machine’s full 6 Mhps would have yielded ~43,829 blocks / ~2.19 million BTC — nearly 2× the actual amount
The ~300-second pauses between consecutive blocks and the deliberate use of only 72.5% of available hashrate demonstrate that Satoshi prioritized network bootstrapping and decentralization over personal enrichment.
Building on Sergio Demian Lerner’s Patoshi pattern research, Lopp’s analysis provided quantitative evidence that Satoshi’s mining behavior was altruistic rather than extractive. The article concludes: “Anyone who claims that Satoshi was greedy simply hasn’t done the math.” That 0.09%-spent baseline is also the yardstick analysts checked a newly-moved block reward against in a January 2023 dormant-coin movement, when the coins in question turned out not to match the Patoshi pattern at all.
This same portrait of a miner who could have taken far more but chose restraint had already been sketched qualitatively, nearly five years earlier, by Ray Dillinger, one of the reviewers of Bitcoin’s original blockchain code; Lopp’s analysis supplies the numbers behind that earlier impression.
This Lopp analysis is treated as load-bearing counter-evidence by the Hal Finney identity hypothesis, which uses Lopp’s reconstruction of Patoshi as ~22,503 blocks / ~1.1M BTC with deliberate hashrate suppression as §2.3 “Patoshi mining-scale inconsistency” evidence against the Hal=Satoshi hypothesis.