Meaning on Feb 20, 2009, people could mine $300,000,000 of Bitcoin (at today's value) on their Pentium II..... per day.  

Clarifying question... I assume people used the same computer to do this day after day, often for weeks or months. If someone ran the mining program for 3 months, it was all going to the same address? I wonder because the one guy who had 75,000BTC on his hard drive that is famously lost in the landfill.... he likely mined that before seed phrases. The fact all there was at the time was the private key and no one has stolen those coins after 11 years, shows how secure private keys can be even without a seed phrase. In theory!

Sigh, here we go again. There is NO limit on how many people one can give the $17,000 gift to, per year. It is a workaround of the lifetime gift-tax/estate exemption. If I gave away the entire lifetime exclusion today, I can still give away up to $17,000 per year to anyone I choose, any time I want, to as many people as I want.

For a group I am trying to rely on for Bitcoin advice, especially around privacy and government, there is a shocking lack of understanding of how the tax code works.

Ummm, it is legal to "gift" up to $17,000 per year, every year, to as many people as one likes, without limit. It is not "wrong" and it is certainly not "tax evasion."

Several commentators here need to learn the tax code better. Millions of families use the $17,000 gift exclusion every year. It is just that no one has tried to use it to randomly give $17,000 to millions of people. But it is perfectly legal. In fact, my wife and I have in our trust to give $17,000 (adjusted upwards by the IRS every year) to over 100 people upon our death, if the estate exclusion limit continues to be reduced.

And yes, I thought I was clear, but this would most likely happen AFTER passing, not while alive. The estate tax does not apply while alive. Finally, the rich routinely give money above the estate tax exclusion to charity to avoid estate tax. So what I am asking about simply replaces charity with gifts to random people.

So, now that this is clear (sheesh, it was not that hard), is there any way someone like Satoshi could set up such a plan? Or does the ledger and addresses and the way it is all set up make such an idea impossible? Thanks.

I struggle to understand how the fees are calculated and even online calculators rarely bring it down to an actual $ fee.

If some whale decided to sell 1,000 Bitcoin today in one transaction, what would the actual fee would be in dollars and cents? Can it even be estimated ahead of time?

If you want to have someone manage your Bitcoin investment and try to guess the ups and downs of Bitcoin better than the marketplace, while purchasing them with debt when he thinks they are a value and then slice off a chunk of your investment as a management fee, then by all means, Microstrategy is the way to go!

I've always wondered whether giving away Bitcoin randomly to addresses might be a way some ultra-rich avoid estate taxes, someday.

Let's say Satoshi wanted to avoid the estate tax, set to go back to 45% on all amounts over $6.8 million beginning in 2025. Assuming he is alive, that would be quite the tax bill. Government would be salivating at the prospect.

Is it theoretically possible if you were Satoshi to just give away $17,000 worth of Bitcoin randomly to 4 million addresses, utilizing the legal annual per-person gift tax loophole? Would such an event even be workable if Satoshi (or anyone else) wanted to give away $17k each randomly? Could the choosing of addresses be achieved by a computer program? Would there be any way to know if the incoming .25 Bitcoin per giveaway was legit and not some scam if you saw it waiting for you?

A relative of mine gave away all money to charity above the estate tax limit to avoid the estate tax a few years back when he passed. But with Bitcoin, it seems there would be interesting wrinkles possible as an alternative to formal charities.

I suspect someday a billionaire might try something just like this to avoid the estate tax and spread the money out, instead of paying the government, while keeping some degree of anonymity for the receiver and sender.

Thoughts?

I don't know who he is but if Forbes still counted him as the owner of 1 million Bitcoin, he would be worth $72.5 billion right now, making him the 21st richest person on Earth, as of today.

Waiting for the day Satoshi distributes $50,000,000,000 as tax-free "gifts" sent all at once randomly to 2.9 million wallets, just to stick it to politicians who want to tax it.

I am surprised that someone has not thought to use readily available AI apps like EmmaIdentity (or something newer), to compared Satoshi's large amount of emails to other early Bitcoin advocates discussions to find out Satoshi's identity. I would think this would now be quite simple and fast to do.

Using the wrong way....according to who?

I would agree that using it as a speculative investment (let's be honest, that is what 95% of all current buyers use it for) is very different from the transaction-oriented, pseudo-anonymous intent of Satoshi. But most of the early miners of Bitcoin were cyberpunks. White males between 30-50 years old, who now are either dead or 45-65 years old. Not exactly a cross-section of society, today. Gen Z (to my surprise) seems to care less about anonymity. They think privacy is dead. They have very different priorities and values than people our age. They will decide for themselves what Bitcoin is useful for. It's not a right way or wrong way... it is just what... is. And we should be stoic about it rather than wishing it is how it was "back in the day," IMHO.

Just curious how they might have lost their Bitcoin by reinstalling Windows.

Given how often computer hard drives seem to crash back in the day, I am amazed 20% of all BTC are not permanently lost.

EDIT.

This is exactly where the "250 BTC/day" mentioned in my original post, was sourced. But that was Feb 16, 2010 and on that day the difficulty was 2.53. Which implies under the formula, even accounting for the fact he was only awake 16 hours per day, he should have been able to mine 790 BTC per waking day. Which is why I am confused. In theory, he should have mined the 250 BTC in just 5 hours. Maybe that is what he meant by "today?" Or perhaps he had an old computer that only had a hash rate of 1? The fact two blocks were mined within 2 minutes of each other but the other three blocks took the remainder of his waking day seems unusual.

Fascinating, thank you.

It sounds like you are saying that if someone used the same computer and their hash rate remained 3 MH/s, that when the difficulty was "2," they could mine 1/2 the amount, or 1,500 per day? And when it was 10, one could mine 300 per day? It's just a linear progression, if the hash rate remained constant?

If so, that is astounding. According to a website that tracks "difficulty" back to January, 2009, the difficulty rate remained "1" from inception until January, 2010. By my calculation, one person with a run of the mill Pentium II and a hash rate of 3, running 24 hours per day for 362 days (Jan 3 was the first block) would have mined 1,086,000 Bitcoin in 2009.

I have always been interested in how difficult it was to mine BTC in 2009, but there seems to be no clear answer.

Various sources using various means of calculation come up with substantially different amounts. I've seen 100 BTC as a number, 150, 250, all supposedly from people who used regular home computers. The person who sold 10,000 BTC for $25 of pizza claimed in late 2010, twenty-two months after the Genesis Block, he was "no longer able to mine over 1,000 per day." One person online said 1,700 per day was possible with a Pentium II in 2009. There is a very big difference between 100 and 1,700 BTC per day.

Does anyone really know how many BTC someone could mine per day back in 2009 with a nice, personal home computer?

Was that same number per day still being mined in mid-2010 or had it become more difficult by that time?

Thanks!