Minitors

What a Minitor is

A Minitor is a robot drawn live from one block’s own data. Nothing about it is picked by hand: the block decides its kind, its colours, its grade and every number on its screen.

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1. The robotIts kind comes from the marks in the block’s winning number. There are eight kinds.
2. The chest screenTap it to flick through eight pages of facts about the block.
3. The metalTrims, eyes, fans, pens and springs upgrade with the block’s luck, from Iron to Diamond.
4. The colourThe background shows which halving era the block was mined in.
5. The details panelGroup, what the block shows, era, time and winning number, at a glance.
6. The gearTap it to see where Minitors come from.

The winning number

To add a block, a miner has to find a number that makes the block’s hash fall under a target. The block keeps that winning number forever, so anyone can read it.

The winning number is 4 bytes long, about 4.3 billion possibilities. Each mining machine searches that space in its own way. Some only ever use certain values, and some can never produce others. Over hundreds of thousands of blocks those habits show up as patterns you can count. Minitors read four of them, with three more years of no proven pattern in between.

Satoshi’s set

In 2009 and 2010, the last byte of the winning number lands in two ranges far more often than chance: 0 to 9, and 19 to 58.

Sergio Lerner described this pattern in 2013 and linked it to the machine that mined many of Bitcoin’s first blocks, widely thought to be Satoshi’s. In blocks 0 to 36,288, 65% of winning numbers end in those ranges. By chance it would be 20%.

A Minitor never claims who mined a block. A 2009–2010 block whose winning number ends in that set simply becomes a Satoshi byte robot.

Counting from zero

Small winning numbers are common in Bitcoin’s first two years.

In 2009 and 2010, 44% of winning numbers sit in the bottom sixteenth of the range. In 2012 to 2014 it is 6.2%, exactly what chance gives. That fits early miners that counted up from zero and started again often, so small numbers came up most. A 2009–2010 block with a small winning number, and no Satoshi byte, becomes a Low number robot.

Machines with empty slots

From mid-2016 to 2019, seven of the 64 values in the top part of the winning number turn up only a third as often, because the most common machine of those years could not make them.

The top six bits of the winning number work like a slot number, from 0 to 63. In 2011 to 2014, every slot is used about equally. In 2015 and early 2016, slots 50 and up are used less often. From mid-2016, slots 57 to 63 drop to about a third of the rest.

The S9’s missing slots

The Antminer S9 mined a large share of blocks from 2016 to 2019. Each of its chips has 114 working cores but numbers them in a space built for 128, so a few slot numbers never come out of an S9. Bitmain’s own S9 code shows this numbering, and Coin Metrics published a study of these machine fingerprints in 2023. The 7,536 blocks from those years that do land in slots 57 to 63 were found by other machines.

A block from mid-2016 to 2019 that an S9 could have made becomes an S9 fit robot. One it could not have made becomes a Gap jumper.

The 2015–16 pattern

The 2015–16 pattern is clear in the blocks, but we found no maker’s code that explains it. So those robots only say what the data shows: an S7 era robot fits the slot pattern of 2015–16 blocks, and a Gap jumper from those years sits in a slot they rarely used.

Scribbles in the version

From 2020, Minitors read a different mark: scribbles in the block’s version field.

BIP 320 sets aside 16 spare bits of the version field that miners can use as extra search space. A block that uses them has scribbles in its version. Almost no blocks did before 2018; in 2019 it was 44%, and in 2025 96%.

From 2020 on, a block with scribble bits becomes a Scribbler and a block without them becomes Plain, so Plain robots get rarer every year.

The eight robots

Each block becomes one of eight robots, sorted by fixed rules from its year and its marks.

Satoshi byte

2009–2010

The winning number ends in Satoshi’s set.

43,818 blocks

Low number

2009–2010

The winning number is in the bottom sixteenth of the range.

34,058 blocks

Static

2009–2014

Matches no fingerprint that can be proven.

258,985 blocks

S7 era

2015 to mid-2016

Fits the slot pattern of 2015–16 blocks.

64,143 blocks

S9 fit

Mid-2016 to 2019

A winning number an S9 can make.

183,155 blocks

Gap jumper

2015 to 2019

In a slot those years’ machines rarely used. From mid-2016, a number an S9 cannot make.

26,532 blocks

Scribbler

2020 on

The version field has scribble bits set.

266,955 blocks

Plain

2020 on

The version field has no scribble bits. Rarer every year.

48,394 blocks

Block counts cover blocks 0 to 926,039, mined up to 1 Dec 2025. Gap jumpers: 18,996 from 2015 to mid-2016 and 7,536 from mid-2016 to 2019.

Luck and grades

Every block’s hash must fall under a target. Most land just under it; a few land far under. That distance is the block’s luck, and luck sets its grade.

Luck counts how many times smaller than the target the hash is, in doublings: level 3 means at least 8 times under, level 10 at least 1,024 times. Each level is half as common as the one before. Across every block, 905 reached level 10 or more; chance predicts 904.

What changes as the grade goes up

• Copper: metal knee bands, wrist cuffs and eye rings.
• Silver: eyes that glance around, a glass shimmer, scanning visors, re-rolling counters.
• Gold: a glow and twinkling stars, glowing eyes, faster fans, a flipping coin, a gold pen that drips ink.
• Platinum: a light sweep over the body, scanning rings, a glowing stylus, glowing springs.
• Diamond: sparkles orbiting the robot, gold plating, crystal parts and a double hop.

Only 20 blocks have reached Diamond so far. The luckiest, blocks 368,527 and 756,951, reached level 20: a hash over a million times under its target.

Halving colours

The background colour shows the halving era the block was mined in, and every future era gets a colour of its own.

The code works out each later era’s colour from its number, so a block mined in 2040 already has its look.

The chest screen

All the facts live on the robot’s chest screen. Tap it to flick through eight pages.

These are the pages of Minitor No. 388,067, a block that voted for the BIP65 upgrade in 2015.

How to mint

Bitmap holders mint Minitors on the Ordinal Portal: one per bitmap, as a child of the bitmap.

1. Open the mint page on the Ordinal Portal.
2. Connect the UniSat wallet that holds your bitmap.
3. Pick your bitmap. The page checks it is the real first-is-first bitmap, that it has no Minitor yet, and that it is settled in your wallet.
4. Check the preview. That is your Minitor, drawn by the inscribed code from your block.
5. Pick a speed and approve one popup in UniSat.
6. Your Minitor lands in your wallet once the next block or two is mined, usually 10 to 20 minutes.

What it costs

There is no mint price. You pay the Bitcoin network fee, about 800 sats at 2 sat/vB (it rises and falls with traffic), and 330 sats that stay inside your Minitor. The page shows the exact total before you approve.

The rules

• Real bitmaps only. The page checks the bitmap against Bitoshi Blockamoto’s bitmap rules and bop’s LiveOCI, right up to the current block.
• One Minitor per bitmap. The first one minted is the real one.
• Your bitmap is the parent. It is used in the mint and comes straight back to your wallet, whole, in the same transaction.
• It never touches a parcel. A Minitor is a child of your bitmap but not a parcel, so it never uses up or blocks one.

Fixed forever

The robot code is inscribed once and every Minitor uses it. There is nothing to update and nothing stored anywhere but Bitcoin.

Each Minitor reads its block number from its parent bitmap and its data from the block itself. It shows only facts: it never says who mined a block. The one hard “no” it makes, that an S9 cannot make a winning number, comes from Bitmain’s own S9 code. New blocks keep coming, and each future block’s Minitor is sorted by the same fixed rules.

Credits and sources

• Sergio Lerner: A new mystery about Satoshi hidden in the Bitcoin block-chain (2013), the pattern behind the Satoshi byte.
• Coin Metrics’ 2023 report on mining-machine fingerprints, as reported by No Bullshit Bitcoin.
• Bitmain’s S9 miner code (bmminer-mix), which shows how the S9 numbers its cores.
• BIP 320, the spare version bits behind the Scribbler and Plain robots.
• BIP 9, with BIP 34, BIP 66 and BIP 65, the network upgrade votes on a Minitor’s screen.
• Bitoshi Blockamoto’s bitmap ruleset, for districts and parcels.
• bop’s LiveOCI, the first-is-first bitmap check up to the current block.
• The bitmap On-Chain Index (OCI), with data from @_lefrog, which a Minitor reads to check bitmaps below block 942,000.
• bitmap-resolver, the open checker the mint page uses to follow LiveOCI.
• Paul Miller’s open-source code: scure-btc-signer, micro-ordinals and the noble libraries, which build and sign each mint on the mint page.
• Ordinals recursion, how a Minitor reads Bitcoin from inside its inscription.
• ordinals.com and mempool.space, which the mint page uses to read Bitcoin and send each mint.

Figures were measured from blocks 0 to 926,039, mined up to 1 Dec 2025.