I keep reading about how some early adopters made 10K+ BTC and I would like to understand how exactly.
At that time, 10k bitcoin was very likely not even worth $10. So, they made 10k BTC, but it wasn't any different than making less than 0.0025 BTC today.
I have been doing research on this forum and elsewhere about how much they made and how exactly they did it, but so far it has all been inconclusive. By very early adopters I mean those who got into Bitcoin between Feb 1st 2009 and July 1st 2009.
They installed the wallet software (Bitcoin-Qt) and let it run. Back then, the mining difficulty was very low, so you could mine with a regular computer all by yourself without being in a mining pool (there were no pools yet). You would get an entire block by yourself a few times per day. Each block solved would result in 50 BTC.
With that said, what would it have taken to mine some 10,000 to 100,000 BTC in that particular time period, in terms of time and processing power spent?
Each block mined included 50 BTC. So, to mine 10,000 BTC you would need to mine:
10,000 / 50 = 200 blocks.
There were about 144 blocks mined every day. If you mined 5% of the blocks, you would get approximately 7 blocks per day. Therefore, it would take approximately 28 days to get 10,000 BTC if you had 5% of the global hash power at the time.
And if instead of mining them myself I decided to buy them from another person (I know there were no exchanges yet, but let's say I started looking for someone to perform a p2p transaction of 10k-100k), how much would I have spent? Or, to put things in another way, how many BTC could $20 have bought in early to mid 2009?
On May 22, 2010 laszlo purchased two pizzas for 10,000 BTC. Those two pizzas cost a total of just a bit more than $40. Therefore, one pizza would be $20. That means in
May 2010 $20 could get you about 5,000 BTC.
However, you are asking about early 2009. I'm not sure if bitcoins had established any value yet at that time. Initially people were sending them to each other for free, just to see how the system worked. You could probably have gotten at least 20,000 BTC for $20 in July 2009. You might have been able to get 20,000 BTC for $1 in February 2009.
Lastly, how much time and effort did it take users like SmokeTooMuch and laszlo to break through their first 10,000 BTC? How were things back then?
I'm not sure, but I don't think laszlo got involved in bitcoin until 2010?
In the first half of 2009, was it really that simple making more than 10,000 BTC?
Yes. This is why they were free. They weren't worth anything because anyone could just make their own. Why pay for something you could create so cheaply that it seemed free?
What kind of computer and how much time did that take?
In January and February of 2009? Pretty much any computer that was capable of running the Bitcoin-Qt wallet would have been capable of earning you 50 BTC or more per week.