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Confirmed addresses & research context

Genesis and Early Bitcoin

The confirmed Genesis and Hal Finney recipient addresses, alongside a separately labelled Patoshi-pattern research estimate.

Confirmed observed

Two addresses from Bitcoin’s first weeks.

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Genesis address transactions
Block 170 recipient transactions

The genesis coinbase output cannot be spent — a quirk of the original implementation left it outside the UTXO set. Its balance nevertheless keeps rising, because people have been sending it tribute payments for over a decade. Those tributes are unspendable too.

Research estimate not observed

The Patoshi pattern.

An early-mining pattern identified by researchers in the nonce and extranonce fields of blocks mined during 2009. It is a statistical argument that one entity mined a large share of the earliest blocks — not a set of addresses anyone can look up, and not a confirmed identity.

Lower estimate

Upper estimate

Share of issued supply

Range applied to live protocol issuance.

Why this stays an estimate

  • The pattern is inferred from block header fields, not from any address BitcoinTrench or anyone else can query.
  • Different researchers draw the boundary of the pattern differently, which is why the figure is published as a range rather than a number.
  • Almost none of these coins have ever moved, which is consistent with several explanations and proves none of them.
  • BitcoinTrench takes no position on who mined these blocks, and does not treat the estimate as part of any supply calculation.