Bitcoin Forum

must have been done by satoshi himself right?

The genesis block was artificially created (50 BTC)
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block
AKA http://blockexplorer.com/b/0

When it was transferred to a wallet then the first block would have been mined (50 BTC)  
http://blockexplorer.com/b/1

Rumour has it that the 10 people involved in the beginning mined (difficulty 1) about 1.5 million bitcoins between them. Which is fair enough for what they have added to the world.

In the early days it was possible generate the coins via the command line with the satoshi client.  If I remember correctly it was used to help stimulate bitcoin usage.  The command is still listed as an option but it no longer generates coins.  

While there isa transaction technically associated with each block reward, if you are looking fro the first actual transaction that was not a block reward it was off this block:
http://blockexplorer.com/block/00000000d1145790a8694403d4063f323d499e655c83426834d4ce2f8dd4a2ee

Rumour has it that the 10 people involved in the beginning mined (difficulty 1) about 1.5 million bitcoins between them. Which is fair enough for what they have added to the world.

This transaction was from Satoshi to Hal Finney.

1.5 million BTC is 30,000 blocks, which would need 208 days to be mined. I'm obviously new to this, but I doubt that ten people were solo mining for 7 months without anyone else noticing / being involved.

Even they somehow did it though, I'd say it's far from 'fair enough'. Given that there will be only 21 million BTC ever created, it would mean that someone (or ten people) will be holding 7% of the currency's monetary base. So, all we've managed to do is substitute FED, ECB, ... (you name it) with Satoshi and company. Hope that's not the case though, or else...

I don't know if it's true, or if I misread it, but in the article that was talking about how even with mixing, you can still be traced, they referenced from a two years ago, someone was trying to sell like 20,000 btc for $50, and couldn't get any takers for it.

As an amusing thought experiment, imagine that Bitcoin is successful and
becomes the dominant payment system in use throughout the world.  Then the
total value of the currency should be equal to the total value of all
the wealth in the world. Current estimates of total worldwide household
wealth that I have found range from $100 trillion to $300 trillion. With
20 million coins, that gives each coin a value of about $10 million.

So the possibility of generating coins today with a few cents of compute
time may be quite a good bet, with a payoff of something like 100 million
to 1! Even if the odds of Bitcoin succeeding to this degree are slim,
are they really 100 million to one against? Something to think about...

Hal

The difficulty was 1 for many 2016-block windows. It should have been lower, but 1 was the lowest it could go. It actually took longer than 2 weeks to mine 2016 blocks, but that was as fast as the diff 1 could produce. Eventually they were mining MORE than 6 blocks an hour, but not enough for the network to recalculate the difficulty to 2. Now-a-days, we don't have that problem. ;) If the network is 3.02% faster, the diff goes up by 3.02%. It's much more accurate today (not including variance).

And ya, the difficulty was 1 for about the first 30,000 blocks, just like you said, and took almost a solid year.

http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/bitcoin/difficulty.png

http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/bitcoin/difficulty-by-time.png

And the diff was still ~20 almost 6 months later, at block 60,000!

I think the early coins are mined just to try it out and many of them maybe forgotten or lost. Just think, Why would you do it if it cost you something and you get nothing - i.e. bitcoins which at that time cost nothing.