Bitcoin Forum

Who was mining the very first Bitcoins? Anyone knows about how large was that group of people? When Bitcoin was not widely and mining difficulty wasn't high, then a small group of people could get a huge percentage (12.5% or 25%, who knows) of the total Bitcoins possible without investing a lot in resources and withing short period of time.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_Currency_Supply

Who were those people? Founders?

Satoshi himself is a very good bet although the first coins are dormant.

No really fair to say the least :) Especially when many believe BTC will be the world's most widely used electronic currency. Wouldn't it be more fair to start rewarding BTC for mining at the point when the difficulty is high enough or make high enough difficulty on the first day of system?  :-\

Yeah, I read wiki. It doesn't really say much details about the start. The idea of Bitcoin is great, but it looks like a huge scam. The question is still open. Why did the founders and first users get a substantial share of the total Bitcoins? Would look much more real if they set difficulty at the start to today's level for example. Would be much harder to make huge profits for a relatively small group of people at the beginning.

It wouldn't be possible, because blocks have to be mined in order to do transactions.
He could have lowered the reward for early mining, but that would have lowered the incentive to get on the Bitcoin train.

At least we know that Satoshi wasn't in for fast profit, otherwise he would have spent a lot of Bitcoins already.
(Or maybe all those early coins are lost?)

Remember Bitcoins weren't worth anything when they were first released. So mining thousands a day still equated to very little or nothing in monetry value.

And why would you want to discourage new-comers to mining by setting the difficulty so high from the start. Satoshi and other developers wanted to encourage people to adopt BTC, not scare them away. It's not unfair that they go there first.

Transactions are included everytime a block is found, so every 10 minutes.

It woul be crap if you had to wait years for a transaction to be included

It would have been (close to) impossible to mine more than a few satoshis back then if they would have had the same difficulty as we have now!

Wouldnt it be fair if we all knew about BTC late 2009 when Bitcoin started :D

No. Satoshi did not make his invention a secret. He made it public beforehand. At the moment of its establishment the bitcoin had been worth nothing. There were no proof it would worth something in the future. There were some people who believed it will worth and they started mining. Why do you think that the risk they took should not be covered now?

About the difficulty at the beginning: the first miners were very slow. It was just straight implementation of double sha256 in pure C code without any optimizations using mmx, sse, GPU or whatever. Still the mining had been producing 50 coins a block regardless of GPU mining introduction, FPGA or whatever. Yes, a year ago the bonus had been halved - just as per design.

What number would you say we are talking here?

exactly.  There would be no incentive for people to start mining and attracting people.  No one would be talking about BTCs today if it were as diffcult back then as it is now.

If those people keep their bitcoin until now, they turned billionaire... But I wonder how many people really did that...

You believe it's unfair for the people who develop a new technology that will improve the world to profit from it? You'd prefer Bitcoin enrich ASIC manufacturers and electric companies rather than people who devoted years to developing Bitcoin?

When people got Bitcoins nearly for free in the early days, that was because they were nearly worthless then. They invested resources, at super high risk, to bootstrap the currency.

A Bitcoin is worth $200 or so today. Long after the early adopter phase was over, Bitcoins were under $2 apiece. So 99% of the profit early adopters made, anyone who wanted to could have made by buying Bitcoins at $2 each. You know why people didn't? Because they didn't think it was worth the risk. Now think about contributing hardware and electricity when Bitcoins were a hundred to the dollar.

Now is your chance to be an early adopter. If Bitcoin takes over the world, it's still early.

I think that Satoshi Nakamoto has the most bitcoins and was the first owner.

From what I've heard, satoshi started mining since day one, and he has almost 1,000,000(unconfirmed however) bitcoin holdings.

Satoshi mined the first 1 million bitcoins but he never used them.
May be he is already dead and the coins are lost with the private keys or may be he is waiting until one BTC is one tousand USD worth.

I agree, but what about those who didnt know about Bitcoin  :P

What about Microsoft shares at the days Microsoft was founded?

Or maybe he lost the private keys and not remember where he save it. Haha

It migh be NSA project, they dont need money.

I mean Satoshi = NSA

What risk are you talking about? At the beginning no huge computational resources were needed because difficulty was low.

What about all these companies who are selling and renting ASICs? Pure scam. There are no rigs that can make you profit currently.

Pool owners making huge profit on pool fee?

The idea is brilliant, but many things around it look so fishy.

What risks at the beginning? Financial risks mainly. You have to pay for electricity. Is it an investment? Yes it is. Is it risky investment? Yes, you could get no return. Is this investment (being done in 2009) could make you a millionaire for spending a single buck? Yes! Is it fair to a new comer now? I can't see why it is not (Do you complain that nobody wants to sell you the shares of Apple or Microsoft at the prices just after their IPO?)

As for ASIC producing companies and pools - is it a property of bitcoin itself or a result of the people's behavior?

You have a lot of information in this forum to take a decision to invest or not to invest. You would say: 'it is huge amount of pages to read!'. Yes, it is huge. But no one said that this is a place where someone gives out free money. You have to do some work to earn some money. At last, you are free not to touch the theme at all. Nobody pushes you to get involved.

P.S. I got involved into all this stuff in April this year after I read some news article about bitcoin. Presently, I would prefer not to read that article.

It would be interesting if one of the most famous people in the world (http://mostfamousperson.net/) one day called a HUGE news conferences and announced that he or she would be launching a new altcoin which is an exact clone of bitcoin on January 1, 2015. He or she should announce this across all social media, their latest song, album, movie, website, etc. They should partner with Google to put it on their homepage and Facebook to put it on their homepage.

They would release the new Genesis Block at the exact pre-scheduled time. The goal here is that everyone knows about the new cryptocurrency in advance, so everyone can plan for it and start mining it, all at the exact same moment. Thus, it would be more "fair".

The world makes the switch over to this new currency - which has the endorsement of one of the world's most famous people.

Your perspective is skewed. Things were very different 4 years ago. Back then, nearly everybody believed that bitcoins were worthless. Why should they profit when they were wrong?


It is strange that people are throwing away money on mining, but that doesn't make it a scam.


Pool owners aren't making a huge profit. Pool owners collectively earn less than 5 bitcoins a day. oops, math fail


There are some sketchy people in the bitcoin world, but overall it is very transparent. Things look fishy because you haven't learned how things work.

Or it goes nowhere, and the promoters get thrown in jail for promoting a scam that cost people billions of dollars.

Well those rig selling companies are making people believe that they can get profit on mining. Obviously it is not true. They are misleading people.

Only one pool I'm in mined more than 20 blocks yesterday. That is 500 bitcoins. 2% or 10 bitcoins went to the pool owner. Pool members can't profit presently.

With the low difficulty there was no significant electricity usage to get large amounts of bitcoins.

It would probably be fair in the case of a start-up company, but we are talking about electronic currency here.

Bitcoin model encouraged the appearance of these scam companies.

Yeah, I read a lot about it last couple of days. It reminds me the old times when I first met HYIP community with e-gold as a main currency. I've seen a couple of Forex related Ponzy schemes that were working for more than 4 years...

Where are Satoshi now?

No one knows, in fact, his identity is unknown.

Strange indeed.

It was Satoshi and since there were no transactions to confirm, he was making money like crazy (I think :P)

Come on guys, he created this, he ought to have a share of at least 10%. People should thank him for this system that can bring down those slave driver institutions.

... that was established as an experiment. Satoshi did not say: "Hey, folks. I have a gold-backed stuff. Let's use it!" He said: "I have an idea of how the digital currency should be implemented. Let's check it". Later, the invention came to be perceived as a real currency by people other than the ones who started it.

It's a useless dispute. Like a dispute "Are bitcoins criminal or not as it is used by criminals?".

So, I quit.

Whoever comes first comes first. Whats unfair about that? Thats the same for any company founding. The first ones to buy a share of a company thats going to explode is always the one making the biggest fortune. Is that unfair also?

That is fair in the case of a real company. But remember, you have to invest your real money if you want to buy a share of a company. First participants of Bitcoin only invested the idea.

Satoshi is like "hey guys, I have a great idea for a new model of digital currency, check it out, you'll love it, we'll take 10% of the whole pie for free, and say others to hurry up if they want to make some real $$$ in a couple of years without investing real money".  ;D

Satoshi whoever he/she/they are is rich -- I mean, *REALLY* rich -- estimates are 1 million to 1.2 million Bitcoin, which is not bad for the estimated couple of years spent writing the code.   And we sort of believe that with Bitcoin currently at $230 (on Gox) and headed higher, he, she, or they are getting richer by the day!

Was it a scam?   ;D If so, it was a masterful one that deserves some praise, because it did that thing that very rarely happens with scams, creating something with a value even greater than what the scammer paid himself. Or herself.  Or themselves. 

I imagine Satoshi somewhere on a massive yacht in the Aegean sea, laughing at us all and romancing curvy Greek babes - or handsome Greek blokes, as the case may be - enjoying champagne and caviar and drinking wine from a lover's navel every night. 

And when I imagine that, I smile.  'Cos Satoshi's scam is enriching us *ALL*. 

Unlike this guy who looks so disgustingly pleased with himself that I'm surprised no one has lynched him yet.
http://media.salon.com/2011/06/tom_delay_mugshot.jpg

It seems like Satoshi put a lot of work into this, so fair enough that he and early adopters get a fair share for believing in BTC. Without them we wouldn't be on this forum today.

It is too early to say "ALL". We'll see what's gonna happen in the near future. Many people will lose their hard earned real money in just one day if the bubble burst. Just like it happens in most Ponzi schemes. Those who jumped in early and cashed out will be happy :)

Again, brilliant idea. Whether it was created with the intention to scam people or with making a new model of monetary instrument.

To be a Ponzi scheme, someone should guarantee us some decent return regularly (e.g. 10% per month). No one tell us we will get something back after spending some fiat on BTC. It's ourselves who believe the price will be higher later. So you can call it 'bubble' at most, but definitely not Ponzi scheme.

This is a self-contradiction. "Ourselves" is a "someone". A Ponzi scheme can use current investors to bring in new investors. (And usually does, particularly when some of the current investors know, or strongly suspect, that it's a Ponzi scheme and still want to make a profit.)

There is one and only one reason Bitcoin isn't a Ponzi scheme -- there's a realistic chance of real value being created and the investors getting a profit from that real value, not just from the investments made by others.

Maybe you are using 'Ponzi scheme' for all 'bubbles', but my understanding of 'Ponzi scheme' is same as the definition in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme

In short, the owner of a 'Ponzi scheme' will pay the early investors regular dividends with the late investors' money, until there are no enough late investors to support the system.

For BTC, there's no owner and no any dividend, people are buying something and hope it can be sold with higher price later. pumping and dumping something far above its value causes a 'bubble', but not a 'Ponzi scheme'. A typical example is 'tulip mania'. No one will call it a 'Ponzi scheme'.

You can also check 'Similar schemes' section in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme, where 'economic bubble' is compared with 'Ponzi scheme'.

The founder has around 10%-15% of total coins in existence today.

Whatever you call it the ultimate result is similar :) When many people believe it is a scam then it probably is.

I doubt many people believe that bitcoin is a scam. Maybe a 'bubble', but not a scam.

For it to be able to be called a scam, Satoshi has to dump all his BTC someday and crash the market, and the market never recovers since then. But in my opinion, the fate of BTC now is out of anyone's control. Even Satoshi can only temporarily crash the market, by dumping all his BTC. I don't see there's any incentive for him to do something like this.

Moreover, I don't believe Satoshi could foresee BTC could reach $200 someday when he invented it. If it was a scam, he would've dumped a large part of his holding during the 2011 crash.

He deserve the coins. Without his work, there would be no Bitcoin

I agree with you. He deserve with it   

but I sure he has too much we are thinking about 10-15% but he is more rich now

I hope Satoshi made some money on Bitcoin.  After all the work he put into building something truly unique, he should be rewarded!

What I read Satoshi does not exchange Bitcoins to fiat. He must have high confidence in Bitcoin future to not cash out something !

satoshi the one who created bitcoin he got a mil bitcoin i think