When you started mining BTC, difficulty was...

[Sonny]

About 1.7 million, but then I saw it drop down to ~1.0 million. I could make several BTC a day with just a few GPUs. Been mining pretty much nonstop for the past 2.5 years.

Wow I never knew Bitcoin ever dropped

Whoever was updating this spreadsheet apparently stopped in August of '13, but it's a great glimpse into the history of Bitcoin.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmcTCtjBoRWUdHVRMHpqWUJValI1RlZiaEtCT1RrQmc#gid=0

And yes, the difficulty has dropped several times. It's even dropped multiple times in a row. You gotta remember: The price had risen to $31, and then crashed to $2. People were abandoning Bitcoin, and we lost almost half of the network. Everyone thought it was a fun little hobby that had run it's course and died. Well, everyone except those of us that believed in it, and kept mining.

For the difficulty beyond Aug2013, you may refer to the bottom part of this site.
http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

[Holm]

1.  i mined one block of 50 in 9 hours on a Pentium 4 3ghz or 8 core AMD

holy cool

it was the best days i think

[RoadStress]

~200k. Good old times!

[Holm]

we can only dreams for such hashrate for any good coins

[Simon8x]

900 million, in Dec 2013

[KaChingCoinDev]

900 million, in Dec 2013

Same... 900 Million   I caught on when BTC was at $1200

[MRKLYE]

12 Million or so

[Syke]

You guys with your tiny 15% increases per adjustment. I remember when it went up 10x in under a month. That was the only time it hit the maximum adjustment cap.

Ugh, from 23 to 244 in 3 weeks.

[thefunkybits]

started mining at 3 million, used to make .1 a week on a home PC 

[Equate]

Started mining on 4M

[bitterguy]

Somewhere around  6.55^12   

[GiLa]

I started around the 4.8m difficulty mark
My mining rig consisted of i5 with 7970 and a 7870 and was producing about 0.1BTC a day
Was also mining on 10x dual Xeon 5630 but all that did was like 120MHs compared to my 1GH on gpu's

Left just before Avalon batch 3's were meant to be delivered, as I had other things that needed my attention.

Came back because I heard that KNC was down to 28nm which is a huge improvement from the 110nm process by Avalon, although KNC uses a structured ASIC design which I think its just a glorified FPGA so not truly optimised ASIC.

Just got my first Antminer S1 about 3 weeks ago for 0.9something BTC and another one 2 weeks ago for 0.89seomthing

I smile every time I look at my S1's and I think wow I just saw the evolution of chip design that went from Pentium 4 Northwood to i5 ivy bridge in the span of less than a year and it only took Intel nearly 14 years to do that same thing. I still love hardware today, ever since my first Olivetti IBM XT clone computer and mucking around with DIP switches and jumpers. So mining is just for fun never really saw it as more than a hobby.

[bitpop]

Intel had no competition until now.

[GiLa]

competition breeds innovation and with BTC market, things just happen so much quicker

[zhang2]

If I can get free power is bitcoin mining still profitable at today's $/BTC rates, or are the hardware costs to high to make it worthwhile? 

[timtech]

193m started with Asic usb miners but quickly bought a Jupiter off eBay. I thought I was super late to the game but made some decent money when the price spiked to $1200 now I'm just holding my coins see what the future holds.

[nyana]

i rememeber the time i earned ~8 BTC a day at deepbit...with 4gh ztex...

and the time i sold hundreds of coins around 5$....love it

 - nyana

[mechtronic2001]

I believe it was around 1,000,000 when I started in 2011

[tzortz]

900 million, in Dec 2013

Same here!

[timk225]

Difficulty was about 9 million when I read a CNN Money article that got me all into coins and coin mining inside of an 8 hour shift at work.  I'm glad I had an easy desktop support job and it was a slow day, so I spent most of the day reading about bitcoins!