miners

Part 5 of the beginner guide. Two simple rules — everyone checks the rules, and the chain with the most work wins — are what keep a system with no boss honest.

Part 2 of 5. Thousands of computers end up agreeing on the exact same record by checking each other's work and chaining every page to the one before it.

A curated way in: questions about Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin history, each pointing to where this archive answers it in full.

No block-size limit, one company's reference client, and five 51%-attack reorgs in a single year — Bitcoin SV's design record, measured against the 'original protocol' it set out to restore.

Bitcoin Cash inherited Bitcoin's ledger and 21 million cap at the 2017 fork, then split twice more under implementation teams with no single founder to arbitrate.

Dogecoin has no whitepaper, no company, and no cap on its supply — a decade-old test of whether Bitcoin's scarcity is what a market actually pays for.

A hundred billion units generated in a single stroke in June 2012, a validator list two organizations curate, and a five-year SEC lawsuit over who was allowed to sell them.

Twelve chains, sorted by what each one's issuance rule settles about the price of a single unit — and by how much of that price the rule never touches.

Where Bitcoin's current reality has drifted from Satoshi's design intent: four axes — mining (one-CPU-one-vote to ASIC oligopoly), custody (own keys to exchange IOUs), governance, and scaling.

Start here if you know nothing about Bitcoin beyond the price. A five-part guide to what a bitcoin is, who keeps the record, how new coins appear, and why no one can cheat it.

What Satoshi's design assumed about a fee-only future, and the documented debate over whether transaction fees alone can sustain proof-of-work security after the block subsidy ends around 2140.

Finding Satoshi (Tooley / Miele, April 2026) names Hal Finney and Len Sassaman as Bitcoin co-creators: Finney coded, Sassaman wrote the paper. Lopp and Back dispute it.

Hashcash's inventor and the first person Satoshi contacted. In April 2026 the NYT named him the closest stylometric match among 620 cryptography-mailing-list writers. The evidence, weighed.

Proof of work vs proof of stake, scored axis by axis with dated numbers: market cap, track record, energy, attack cost, decentralization, speed and new-chain adoption, with DPoS and PoA beside them.

Lerner published The Patoshi Mining Machine, using re-mining to argue Satoshi mined on one high-end CPU scanning 5 nonce subranges in parallel, not on about 50 networked computers.

Whale Alert independent analysis confirmed Satoshi mined 1,125,150 BTC across 22,503 of the first 54,316 blocks, claiming ~48 computers (later disputed by Lerner's single-PC simulation).

Six years after his original analysis, Lerner published The Return of the Deniers and the Revenge of Patoshi, coining the term Patoshi and proving a single PC clock via timestamp-inversion evidence.

Mike Belshe suspended the SegWit2x hard fork on the mailing list, about a week before the planned 2 MB activation at block 494784. The New York Agreement collapsed without a chain split.

CoinMarketCap recorded Ethereum's market cap at roughly 85% of Bitcoin's on June 12, 2017 — the closest the name behind 'the flippening' ever came to the number, before both fell back.

Matt Corallo joined Bitcoin Core in 2011, co-founded Blockstream in 2014, authored BIP 152's Compact Block Relay, built the FIBRE relay network, then moved on to Chaincode Labs and Spiral.

Why Bitcoin's 2015-2017 fork wars ran as identity contests, not OSS disputes: the post-2011 authority vacuum, the economic weight on rule choices, and the three layers that bound code to currency.

Cross-cutting reading of Bitcoin's 2015–2017 block-size war by phase, faction, and turning point: Bitcoin XT, BIP148 UASF, the New York Agreement, Bitcoin Cash, SegWit2x cancellation.

French software engineer. Founded Bitcoin ABC, led the 2017 BCH hard fork, defended BCH in the 2018 BSV hash war, led the 2020 split into eCash.

Sergio Demian Lerner published The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi, identifying a distinctive mining pattern (later named Patoshi) linking ~22,000 blocks (~1.1M BTC) to a single miner.

Sergio Demian Lerner (1972–): Argentine cryptographer and blockchain researcher whose Patoshi analysis identified Satoshi as the dominant early miner, holding ~1.1M BTC and spending almost none.

On March 11, 2013, one large block split Bitcoin: v0.8 nodes accepted it, older nodes rejected it. Developers chose the shorter chain every version accepted, and two pools downgraded to rejoin it.

American developer (luke-jr), long-tenured Bitcoin Core contributor. Maintains Bitcoin Knots; co-founded Ocean mining pool (2023). Suffered a $3.5M+ wallet theft in late 2022 (compromised PGP key).

Benjamin Wallace's Wired feature — an early major mainstream article on Bitcoin. Traces the whitepaper, mining boom, Mt. Gox hack, and growing pains, ending with Garzik's "We really don't care."

The Bitcoin Forum, set up by Martti Malmi at bitcoin.org/smf, migrates to the independent bitcointalk.org domain in August 2011. Theymos managed the migration; all posts and accounts were preserved.

Chinese entrepreneur (1986–). Translated Bitcoin whitepaper into Chinese (2011), co-founded Bitmain (2013), backed Bitcoin Cash with hashpower (2017), later founded Matrixport and Bitdeer.

Vincent Durham launched Namecoin on April 18, 2011 — the first altcoin and first fork of the Bitcoin codebase. It implemented the BitDNS proposal as a decentralized name registration system.

Bitcoin v0.3.18 was released on SourceForge, one of Satoshi's last releases, featuring wallet compatibility fixes and Gavin Andresen's accounts-based JSON-RPC commands.

In 2010, Marek Palatinus proposed Bitcoin's first mining pool. He went on to co-design the Stratum protocol, co-found Trezor, and co-author BIP-39, the seed-phrase standard nearly every wallet uses.

The August 2010 overflow recovery rested on knightmb's snapshot. Secondary sources have since attached a misattributed 10%-holder claim and a contested Tennessee identification to the same handle.

Emergency release of Bitcoin v0.3.10 to fix a value overflow vulnerability exploited to create 184 billion bitcoins in a single transaction. Satoshi coordinated the rapid soft-fork deployment.

Software engineer (born 1974), Linux kernel contributor, Red Hat employee. Discovered Bitcoin via Slashdot in July 2010. Top-3 Bitcoin Core contributor, built cpuminer, wrote BIPs, co-founded Bloq.

Hanyecz recalls Satoshi reciprocating his GPU miner code by sharing his own GPU mining code, kept as defense against potential 51% attacks rather than for mining. From later interviews.

Bitcoin's first price was a production-cost estimate. Satoshi predicted in 2010 that market price would come to dictate production cost — not the reverse. The arc from 2009 to modern models.

Trammell shares his IP for Satoshi to send coins, says proof-hashes is open for posting, names the challenge of getting people to value bitcoins, and compares mining to a roulette wheel.

Satoshi informs Trammell that bugs are fixed in v0.1.3 and offers to send him some coins via the send-to-IP feature, one of the earliest known direct Bitcoin transfers.

Trammell asks what prevents the most powerful node from generating the majority of bitcoins — one of the earliest questions about mining centralization.

Satoshi's difficulty retarget has an off-by-one: it measures 2,015 blocks instead of 2,016. A hashrate majority can exploit it via timestamp manipulation. The Great Consensus Cleanup proposes a fix.

How Bitcoin nodes agree on a single chain: SHA-256d proof of work, the difficulty adjustment algorithm, block validation rules, fork resolution, and probabilistic finality.

How Bitcoin blocks are structured, how Merkle trees commit transactions to block headers, and how the most-work chain selection rule resolves forks.

How Bitcoin's 21 million cap emerges from a geometric halving series, how block rewards transition from subsidy to fees, and how the incentive model sustains honest mining.

How the Bitcoin ecosystem layers above and around the base chain: Lightning payment channels, federated sidechains, L1 envelope extensions, and mining pool architectures.

How Bitcoin nodes find each other, exchange transactions and blocks, and resist network-level attacks across the P2P gossip layer.

Bitcoin's threat model mapped end-to-end: what the protocol trusts, what it defends against, how each attack is countered, and where open risks remain.

How Bitcoin Core manages keys, constructs transactions, selects coins, estimates fees, and exposes functionality through RPC, REST, and ZMQ interfaces.

High-level system overview of Bitcoin's architecture, layer model, and data flow. Entry point to a 12-page design-document series covering every major subsystem.

In 2008 Satoshi wrote that only coin creators would eventually need to run nodes. Mining did leave ordinary computers; nodes did not. Who runs the 25,489 reachable addresses, and why, with no reward.

Genealogy of every Bitcoin protocol fork that left a separate chain alive (Bitcoin Cash, SV, Gold) and the adjacent cryptocurrencies derived from Bitcoin (Namecoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin).

Recurring Satoshi candidates aligned across four independent layers — profile match, stylometric attribution, direct correspondence, and development environment.

Adam Back announces Hashcash to the Cypherpunks list — a proof-of-work postage scheme against spam, framed within the digital-cash discourse as a stop-gap or fallback for digicash.