Indeed, in what proved to be an interesting sociological and behavioral overview (among other things), the study carried out by a group of authors from Texas higher education institutions revealed that these pioneer Bitcoin miners, or as the study calls them, ‘agents,’ mined most Bitcoin between January 3, 2009, and February 9, 2011. As per the text: Notably, some of these top ‘agents’ include the famous Satoshi Nakamoto, aka Agent #1 – the largest agent, the infamous ‘Dr. Evil’ aka knightmb aka Michael Mancil Brown aka Agent #19, who was federally convicted for attempting to ransom Mitt Romney’s tax returns, as well as ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’ aka Ross Ulbricht aka altoid aka Agent #67. Ulbricht is also known as the founder of the Silk Road, a criminal marketplace on the dark web where users could make all sorts of illegal purchases using Bitcoin as payment. The Silk Road was active from January 2011 to October 2013.
With great power comes great responsibility
One of the most interesting conclusions delivered by the study was that these most powerful network participants, who controlled nearly all of the network’s computational resources in the observed period, had multiple chances to abuse their power but chose not to. The study has shown that these agents repeatedly declined to carry out the ‘51% attacks’, despite having sufficient computational resources and early centralization allowing them to do so: They concluded that: Bitcoin wasn’t worth anything at launch, but it reached parity with the U.S. dollar only 25 months later. Precisely ten years after achieving the price parity, the flagship cryptocurrency was worth $46,257. At press time, Bitcoin is trading at $29,500, which is 6% down on the day and a 7.25% drop across the week, according to CoinMarketCap data.
