He released a study in 2013 that suggested that the vast majority of the initial BTC mined was done by just one single miner. In this original paper, he provided evidence that suggested a single miner could have possibly processed 22,000 blocks in the first year of Bitcoin. Lerner estimated that the miner was able to gather at least 1.8 million Bitcoin over the period, of which 1.1 million Bitcoin has still not even been spent.

Lerner dubbed this miner as "Patoshi".