Satoshi Nakamoto didn’t just launch Bitcoin and walk away. In the first week, he actively shaped its growth - by turning it off. Eight times, the network halted for hours or more. Alex Waltz’s analysis of block timestamps and nonce resets shows these were deliberate pauses, not crashes.
According to Waltz on Bitcoin Takeover, Satoshi used these gaps to let others catch up. The network’s difficulty adjustment would have locked out new miners if Satoshi had kept mining solo. By pausing, he effectively seeded decentralization - manually.
"The halts were not failures. They were invitations."
- Alex Waltz, Bitcoin Takeover Podcast
The identity of the second miner has long been debated. Hal Finney is widely credited, but Waltz argues the data points to Dustin Trammell. Trammell provided cryptographic proof of control over block 309 and claimed block 78 - evidence harder to dismiss than logs alone.
The 'Poshi' pattern - a hardware-specific signature in nonce increments - remains central to Waltz’s case. Sergio Damian Lerner first identified it. Waltz spent a year verifying it. Despite pushback from developers like Greg Maxwell, who calls it noise, Waltz insists it’s a definitive fingerprint of Satoshi’s operation.
"The way the nonces roll over is specific to the hardware. It’s not random. It’s not shared. It’s a signature."
- Alex Waltz, Bitcoin Takeover Podcast
Satoshi’s hand in Bitcoin’s infancy was far more active than myth suggests. These pauses weren’t bugs. They were policy.
