Yet counterintuitively, the data shows that even though 64 parties controlled most of the computing power during this era, they all acted in the best interest of the network.
“We sought to understand the socioeconomic process by which bitcoin transitioned from a digital object with no market, to a functional medium of exchange,” researcher Erez Lieberman Aiden told CoinDesk.
According to the study, 64 separate actors mined a significant proportion of the BTC created from Jan.
Those tiles are positioned in the circle in a clockwise direction according to the time when those agents mined their first bitcoins.
This era long predated the advent of specialized mining machines, known as ASICs .
To successfully mine BTC, a computer must randomly generate a string of numbers called a nonce that, when fed into a mathematical formula along with a few other inputs, produces an output below a certain target.
“There are extensive correlations between all of the apparently meaningless strings associated with a single user,” it says.
The fewer miners there are, the greater the chances for one to dominate the network or for more than one to collude to do so.
For example, three of the 64 “top agents” each mined six or more blocks in a row.
Lerner suggested in a study released in 2020 that early miners took measures to foster healthy mining competition while also ensuring that there were enough miners online to secure the network and produce blocks in a timely fashion.
In the example above, if the FBI knows Ted is a drug lord, it can subpoena Alice’s transaction history from the crypto exchange she used to send him the BTC.
If nothing else, the researchers’ address-linking exercise underscores a well-known risk of using public, immutable ledgers like the Bitcoin blockchain.
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