Reproducible on-chain forensics of the original Satoshi's footprint — every figure re-derivable from public data, and never graded above what the evidence supports.
This organization builds auditable tools for one question: what is the verifiable
on-chain footprint of the original Satoshi on the original Bitcoin chain — nothing that
rests on off-chain claims or on the word "Satoshi" in someone's mouth. Every number is
re-derivable from the chain itself: a synced Bitcoin Core node, or the public
bigquery-public-data.crypto_bitcoin dataset.
| Tier | What | Certainty |
|---|---|---|
| A · Definitional | The genesis block (height 0): its coinbase message, key, and permanently-unspendable 50 BTC, hardcoded in the consensus rules. | Certain — it is the chain's first constant. |
| B · Forensic | The Patoshi cluster — one dominant early miner fingerprinted by block-header structure (Lerner, 2013). ≈22k of the first ≈50k blocks, ≈1.1M BTC, still unspent. | Statistical, not cryptographic — a fingerprint, not a signature. |
| C · Attested | Block 170 — Satoshi → Hal Finney, 10 BTC, spending block 9's Patoshi coinbase. | On-chain certain that the spend happened; "it was Satoshi" rests on B + Finney's own account. |
No genesis-era or Patoshi key has ever produced a verifying signature — only that would upgrade Tier B from attributable to proven. Every public "I am Satoshi" claim (including the BSV-side ones rejected in COPA v Wright, 2024) fails exactly this test. The ≈1.1M BTC staying silent for 15+ years is itself the strongest ongoing statement: the keys don't speak, and no impostor can make them.
Everything here is graded [forensic], never [cryptographic].
- satoshi-onchain — a reproducible
verifier + Patoshi classifier + coin-by-coin verdict tool. Faithfully reproduces Lerner's
ExtraNonce/nonce-LSB analysis, refines the raw filter into a dormancy-validated estimate
(~22.5k blocks, landing on Lerner two independent ways), and resolves any "Satoshi-era
wallet moved N BTC" headline to
GENESIS / PATOSHI / AMBIGUOUS / NOT-PATOSHI. Stdlib-only except plotting. MIT.
original-bitcoin-laboratory · bitcoin-lab.org — an evidence-first, executable reconstruction of the earliest Bitcoin: the November 2008 pre-release and the January 2009 v0.1.0 client, built from hash-verified archives, with nothing disabled and no chain privileged.
Two halves of one question, answered with different evidence. That laboratory gets to the bottom of Bitcoin by making the earliest code run and re-derive. This organization gets to the bottom of Satoshi by measuring what the chain itself records. Neither leans on the other's conclusions.
Sources: S. D. Lerner, "The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto" (bitslog, 2013) for the ExtraNonce/nonce methodology; the chain itself for the genesis and block-170 facts. Reproducible-measurement discipline throughout.