Quote from: mynonce on November 14, 2021, 11:10:49 PM

Quote from: crwth on November 14, 2021, 01:56:41 PM

It's amazing to read out this thread in the hopes of knowing what blocks satoshi has mined but is there any reason why you want to know it?

We exactly know what blocks Satoshi mined. https://whale-alert.medium.com/the-satoshi-fortune-e49cf73f9a9b

The reason is the ''thread question'': Satoshi's blocks have unusual nonce values, why?
...

... and someone chimes in who has written quite a few miner drivers and ... ... lotsa other stuff ...

Back in 2010 mining was quite slow ... as is obvious by the block difficulty though that was also a side effect of the number of people doing mining.

However, if you fast forward to 2011 you find CPUs doing about 30MH/s
So at 30MH/s how long does it take to do a full nonce range?
2^32 / 30e6 = 143 seconds
What's the expected time of a block ignoring diff changes? 600 seconds
So mining a whole nonce range at 30MH/s is very roughly 1/4 of the average time of a block

What % of blocks will be less than 143 seconds after the previous?
CDF(143/600) gives a bit more than 20%

So already if he was just using one computer, he would have certain nonce values that would appear, very obviously, less often.
Ooooh a pattern? Nope that's just not understanding what's going on

There's other reasons why certain nonce values might be skewed.

e.g. in early 2013 when xiangfu and I worked on the icarus FPGA driver, you had to decide at what point to stop mining a work item and overwrite it with a new work item (due to how the fpga was designed) so that it wasn't idle before it completed the nonce range.
Of course this isn't the same as CPU mining, however, the concept may well have been similar when deciding to change work for mining in 2010.

Another idea: like updating the time in the block header while mining?
Yes the time in the block header is NOT when the block was mined. It is set in the work before it is mined ...
If he was doing that once a minute, then a single CPU would never finish a nonce range.

A current necessary one is adding in more expensive transactions into the work.
While this certainly wasn't a necessity for the earliest blocks, there was certainly some turning point where updating the work, before a block was found, became necessary, and who knows, maybe even satoshi thought of this before it was necessary and tried that?

All in all, people WANT to find magic patterns so they can discern order out of randomness.
Alas it is pointless. Random is as random does. Any patterns found will be there for some programming necessity (or bug), not some secret illuminati code to allow you to find those 800,000 BTC - back luck to you