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.”