Paper claims that there were only 64 people mining Bitcoin between the Genesis Block and February 2011.

The author seemed surprised that, although it was possible that someone could have performed a 51% attack back then, no one did so.

To us it's a no-brainer that this didn't happen - as we know that those who took part back then were cypherpunks and cryptographers and that Bitcoin worked because it levered the game theory principle that it was in everyone's interest to work together.

Of course, when the press came to hear of the study, they only focused in on the Silk Road founder and another miner who tried to extort money from Mitt Romney - The Times ignores 'Agent #6' who would have been Laszlo Hanyecz (the guy who bought two pizzas for 10,000 BTC - as he was the first to use GPUs to mine rather than CPUs). The Times also seems happy to explode the myth that people can't be identified. The Times also gave their article the click-baity title, 'How ‘Trustless’ Is Bitcoin, Really?' conveniently forgetting that the study concentrated on the very early first two years of Bitcoin.

The NYT piece can be found here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/06/science/bitcoin-nakamoto-blackburn-crypto.html

The peer-reviewed paper can be downloaded using the link below.

'Cooperation among an anonymous group protected Bitcoin during failures of decentralization' https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.02871