How did BitCoin start on a technical prospective

[papajo]

I am trying to make more sense about what miners do how pools are set up and with which creteria they get assignet some work and assign work to their pool grid

I am still at the beginning... learning the fundamental ideas...


So I read this: http://www.coindesk.com/information/how-do-bitcoin-transactions-work/ (its about a simple explanation on how transactions are made using bitcoins)


But I have a question now..


So if miners actually do just validating traffic of the bitcoins then how did this all start?

I mean ok after some people exchanged bitcoins all miners had to do is to decifer those packages of information validate that the ammounts add up corectly and then verified the transaction

But how did it start? I mean back when noone had a bitcoin or a fraction of it.. how did the frist miners mine.. what was the "job" that was assigned to them? since there could not be a blockchain of transactions since no transaction occured at the very beginning of bitcoins...

So any ideas or links? thnx a lot.

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[Stephen Gornick]

But how did it start? I mean back when noone had a bitcoin or a fraction of it.. how did the frist miners mine.. what was the "job" that was assigned to them? since there could not be a blockchain of transactions since no transaction occured at the very beginning of bitcoins...

Ya, the blockchain concept is a little foreign and takes a while to understand.

The "work" performed in mining is to compile a block that contains the coinbase transaction as well as ZERO or more additional transactions, and then perform a hash of the block such that the numeric value of the output of that hash is below some target "difficulty" value.

So there didn't need to be any additional transactions to build a block, other than the coinbase transaction.  Even today there are blocks mined occasionally with zero additional transactions in them (other than the coinbase transaction itself), simply because whoever mined it didn't include any.  That's perfectly valid, just not economically smart since there were likely fees from other transactions that were passed up.

Here's the first block
 - http://blockexplorer.com/block/000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f

Click on Next block .... it goes until block 170 without any transactions:
 - http://blockexplorer.com/block/00000000d1145790a8694403d4063f323d499e655c83426834d4ce2f8dd4a2ee

[papajo]

 what do you mean by coinbase?

[cowandtea]

what do you mean by coinbase?

https://coinbase.com/ that is coinbase...

[deepceleron]

See link in my signature...

Blocks still are mined and give a reward to the miner even if there are no transactions to include in the block. Much of the blockchain in the first year of Bitcoin's existence is blocks with no transactions other than the one that pays the block mining reward.

The "coinbase" transaction is the transaction that miners are allowed to include, paying newly created bitcoins and the transaction fees to themselves.