In a separate email sent just nine minutes after reporting upgrade issues, Trammell raised what would become one of Bitcoin’s most enduring questions — mining centralization:
What prevents the single node with the most CPU power from generating and retaining the majority of the BitCoins? If every node is working independently of all others, if one is significantly more powerful than the others, isn’t it probable that this node will reach the proper conclusion before other nodes? An underpowered node may get lucky once in a while, but if they are at a significant horsepower advantage I would expect the majority of BitCoins to be generated by the most powerful node.
Satoshi’s reply the next day would explain that mining is not a race but a probabilistic lottery where each SHA-256 hash guess has an independent chance of success, and a computer’s share of coins is linearly proportional to its CPU power.
Source: Published by Dustin Trammell in November 2013. The full correspondence is archived on the Bitcoin Wiki at en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Source:Trammell/Nakamoto_emails.