Patoshi Pattern Reconstructed: Up to 1.17 Million BTC Linked to Bitcoin's Earliest Miner
Bitquery's recent analysis of Bitcoin's early days has shed new light on the mysterious Patoshi mining pattern. The firm identified approximately 22,000 to 23,500 blocks attributable to a single entity, which is roughly 22% of those early blocks. This suggests that this miner was running custom mining software while most other participants were using off-the-shelf tools.
The analysis correlates at 99.2% with previously compiled public Patoshi address lists drawn from researcher Sergio Demian Lerner's original work in 2013. The reconstruction covers the first 54,316 blocks ever mined and provides a compelling case for the identity of Bitcoin's earliest miner.
As of September 1, 2026, an estimated 1,023,352 BTC linked to the Patoshi pattern had never been spent. This represents somewhere around 5% of all Bitcoin that will ever exist, with a total supply capped at 21 million coins and roughly 19.7 million mined so far.