How was Bitcoin mining done in the early days?

[prithibiahmed]

How was Bitcoin mining done in the early days, and what changes have been made to the mining process since then?

[un_rank]

The concept of mining has remained unchanged over the years: difficulty level and adjustment time, halving, average block time etc have all been part of the network. What has changed is the number of miners and the quality of materials used to compete for rights to the next block.

In the early days, you could mine off your home PC and be very profitable, cause the competition was low as well as the difficulty level.

Today, a PC is not viable in the mining space and you need lots of gear and high caliber equipment.

- Jay -

[buwaytress]

You can try mining on the testnet to get an idea of how it was done back in the day... at least that was what I thought I did some years back. Also tried mining on some altcoins that were just clones of Bitcoin, just to get "the feel" of finding a block!

I like to think Laszlo must have mined all his tens of thousands on Bitcoin on his PC in the background, while wondering what to order for his kids' dinner.

[coolcoinz]

Early bitcoin mining was done on PC. Satoshi mined his first coins using his computer's CPU and hoped bitcoin would stay longer on CPU mining, but the demand pushed difficulty to new highs and CPU mining quickly became obsolete.

There are interviews with early bitcoin miners on youtube.

Here's a guy GPU mining bitcoin in 2011 on a dedicated multi-GPU machine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEGIZOO-HYY

Miner who used his home computer in 2011. He says he used to earn about 1 bitcoin a day on his double GPU setup.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFE2FV9ia1s

When I first heard of mining it was impossible to mine on PC anymore. It was all about ASICS.

[lassdas]

In the early days, you could mine off your home PC and be very profitable, cause the competition was low as well as the difficulty level.

Sure, you could mine on practically any home PC, but why do you think it was very profitable?
It wasn't.
Simply because those coins weren't actually worth much, like 1-10cent/btc (pre-GPU prices).
You kept your CPU crunching for hours/days and got coins worth cents if you found a block.
And besides that, you couldn't even sell those coins to anyone outside of this forum or the irc-channel and most users here or there just mined themselves.

So, it wasn't mining that was very profitable, HODLing those coins was though.

But for HODLing coins, it doesn't really matter if you mine them, buy them, or get them any other way.

[tabas]

You run it on an old PC and mine it and you're good to go, that's how easy it was before because of the difficulty wasn't really a thing before. But as time passes, when many have discovered and how interesting it was to mine bitcoin then difficulty have increased overtime.
And that's why you can no longer mine it on a typical PC/desktop setup these days. But if you're looking to mine with the same thing as before, there are altcoins that you can mine with CPU but do not expect them to be that much valuable if you want to try.

[pawel7777]

I missed the good old days when you could mine profitably with this bad boy. Everything was simpler back then


At least I have some memories. I kind of feel sorry for those who got into bitcoin later and never had a chance to mine anything themselves.

[coupable]

I don't think you want to know the technical difference in the quality of the change that took place over the years. You can ask in the Technical Discussions section, or it is enough to use the search feature.
Overall, I can tell you that the process was less complicated than it is today. And it was within the reach of the public, unlike today it has become a monopoly on a few parties.

[logfiles]

In the early days, you could mine off your home PC and be very profitable, cause the competition was low as well as the difficulty level.

It wasn't very profitable as such. The 50 BTC mining reward wasn't worth that much back in the day, especially when not so many people believed in Bitcoin yet. It's just that today's price of bitcoin changes the perspective a lot. Those who held on to the mined Bitcoins are the ones who enjoyed the most.

[bitcoindusts]

Bitcoin mining was first done with CPU, then it improves and done via GPU.  After some years, ASIC had been introduced and now it is mainly the miners used since GPU and CPU hash power is obsolete to compete against ASIC miners.  There is also some point in early years that botneck is used to mine Bitcoin.  This is a person injecting malware to several private computers in order to mine Bitcoin for him.

[BlackBoss_]

Bitcoin mining was easy in early days and with CPU, you can mine it. It is part of reasons which can explain why Bitcoin had low value in the the past. People did not realize its value because they could mine bitcoin easily.

I did not mine bitcoin in 2009, 2010 but I knew how easy to mine shitcoins. Mining bitcoin was easily as same as mining shitcoins today.

My topic's not done yet. Bitcoin mining history

From CPU, GPU, FPGA to ASIC and many reward types.

[raja9167]

How was Bitcoin mining done in the early days, and what changes have been made to the mining process since then?

When Bitcoin was first introduced in 2009, it was designed to be mined by anyone with a computer. The mining process was simple and only required a standard CPU to solve the mathematical equations necessary to verify transactions on the network. Miners would compete to solve these equations, and the first miner to do so would be rewarded with new bitcoins.
Since the early days of Bitcoin, the mining process has undergone several changes. The most significant change was the introduction of specialized mining hardware known as Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) miners. These miners are much more efficient at solving the mathematical equations required to mine new blocks and are much faster than traditional CPUs and GPUs.

Another change to the mining process is the increase in mining difficulty. As more miners joined the network, the difficulty of solving the equations increased, making it more difficult for individual miners to earn rewards. This led to the formation of mining pools, where multiple miners combine their computing power to increase their chances of solving the equations and earning rewards.

[justdimin]

Bitcoin mining was easy in early days and with CPU, you can mine it. It is part of reasons which can explain why Bitcoin had low value in the the past. People did not realize its value because they could mine bitcoin easily.

I did not mine bitcoin in 2009, 2010 but I knew how easy to mine shitcoins. Mining bitcoin was easily as same as mining shitcoins today.

My topic's not done yet. Bitcoin mining history

From CPU, GPU, FPGA to ASIC and many reward types.

I remember the period when people learned about FPGA's and how they could mine so much more bitcoin per day, I remember it because I was mining with my gpu at the time and it was still mining a lot, thousands of dollars worth today amounts were easily mined those days in a single day with a crappy gpu, and I mean like nearly CPU levels of today.

This is why I believe that people really considered it as a respectable currency considering they could just mine it so easily to make money, what in the world would be so easy to have that could worth so much? But the higher the price got, the more machinery miners started to build and that's when things got serious.

[darkangel11]

I missed the good old days when you could mine profitably with this bad boy. Everything was simpler back then


At least I have some memories. I kind of feel sorry for those who got into bitcoin later and never had a chance to mine anything themselves.

I had these. Even mounted little radiators on the other side of the chips to make them cooler. As far as I remember I made about 0.3BTC with each of them before I sold them to some other guy who used them to mine altcoins. Good old days... I wish I knew what I know now back then... I can't believe it's been so many years. You made me feel old.

This is why I believe that people really considered it as a respectable currency considering they could just mine it so easily to make money, what in the world would be so easy to have that could worth so much? But the higher the price got, the more machinery miners started to build and that's when things got serious.

Yes we're the new generation of people who grew up knowing bitcoin, it was a part of our lives for over a decade. For us it's as normal as smartphones and HD video. Bitcoin is not going away.

[khaled0111]

Bitcoin mining was easy in early days and with CPU, you can mine it. It is part of reasons which can explain why Bitcoin had low value in the the past. People did not realize its value because they could mine bitcoin easily.

It's true that mining bitcoin in the early days didn't require much computational power and you could easily find a new block by using a regular pc. This was due to the low difficulty and lack of miners (competition = low hashing power).
But this is not the reason why bitcoin price was too low. The real reason is the lack of awareness and adoption, only few people believed in bitcoin back then.

[pooya87]

Overall, I can tell you that the process was less complicated than it is today. And it was within the reach of the public, unlike today it has become a monopoly on a few parties.

The process of mining is exactly the same as day one. You construct a block, fill it with transactions from your mempool and compute the header's hash and compare it with the target. If it is bigger, you make small changes and recompute the hash until you find the hash that is not bigger than the target.

It is not a monopoly either, it just takes a better commitment than just turning your PC on and using your CPU to mine bitcoin. You have to make an investment (commit some money) to buy ASICs and mine bitcoin with them at a much higher hashrate.

[worle1bm]

The difficulty has increased a lot as more miners have jumped into mining process due to high profitability related with it but back in the days it was easy as you can do it with your own PC and CPU only.I am preety sure the first few blocks would have been mined with this method only so those were lucky days.But now you need ASIC machines and lot of hash power to find target but if you want to have the actual experience you can test it yourself.

[D ltr]

 I'm a person who doesn't really understand how to mine btc. From some of the explanations from friends, it's a little open that when mining was first introduced, it was very friendly, only using the CPU, you could mine btc,
but for now mining btc is just a dream
because it's already difficult if you only use the CPU and individuals

[Outhue]

In the early days of bitcoin mining, you only need a Pentium 4 CPU or USB miner to mine a good amount of Bitcoin per day, when the Quadro GPU and FPGA came they became a good option too but as time flew by every day, the difficulty of Bitcoin start increasing, making the early equipment obsolete, then ASIC miners were born, Block reward kicked in too, making the number of BTC per block lower.

[BTCBroker2016]

In my mind it looks so old comparing to today tech possibility