A Personal Computer Mined How Many Bitcoin Per Day In 2009? 100? 250? 1700?

[DeathAngel]

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

In 2009, the difficulty was 1. The number of blocks a computer could mine at the time varied depending on many factors, but a CPU miner had a hash rate of up to around 3 MH/s. With a difficulty of 1, that corresponded to a maximum of about 60 blocks per day, or 3000 BTC/day.

In 2010, the difficulty rose quickly as more people began mining, and so the number dropped. By the end of 2010, the difficulty was around 15000, so that same 3 MH/s CPU miner only mined 0.2 BTC/day.

BTW, the average time between blocks can be estimated with this:

time in seconds = difficulty * 2³² / hash rate

So, the average time to find a block for a 3 MH/s CPU at a difficulty of 1 is 1 * 2³² / 3000000 = 1432 seconds

Incredible insight, if only I was lucky enough to be aware of Bitcoin back then. By the time I finally got in, in 2015,  the days of solo CPU Mining were a thing of the past. Congratulations to were involved that early, must feel good.

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[Eddie Sockittome]

Although the OP asked an interesting question, it is also very interesting to me that during the first 4 years as much as 50% of all Bitcoins were mined, and of that as much as 2.625 million in the first year.

Therefore, we can conclude that the first users were really privileged in some way, because not only could they mine with their personal computers, but they also had the opportunity to mine blocks with the highest rewards. It was, without any doubt, perhaps the most interesting time in the short history of Bitcoin, and the most fruitful period in someone's life if by any chance he saved the mined BTC for the future.

I think a lot of them lost their bitcoins, for example, by simply reinstalling Windows, since then bitcoin was almost worthless. But, many have earned for themselves for life. Oh, I would like to be in 2009 now))

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.

[bobbybkk]

Although the OP asked an interesting question, it is also very interesting to me that during the first 4 years as much as 50% of all Bitcoins were mined, and of that as much as 2.625 million in the first year.

Therefore, we can conclude that the first users were really privileged in some way, because not only could they mine with their personal computers, but they also had the opportunity to mine blocks with the highest rewards. It was, without any doubt, perhaps the most interesting time in the short history of Bitcoin, and the most fruitful period in someone's life if by any chance he saved the mined BTC for the future.

I think a lot of them lost their bitcoins, for example, by simply reinstalling Windows, since then bitcoin was almost worthless. But, many have earned for themselves for life. Oh, I would like to be in 2009 now))

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.

I guess in the early days Bitcoin was kind of worthless, so nobody bothered to save the private key on paper or so. So people just deleted the whole wallet when reinstalling windows....Bitcoins gone....

[Ratters]

I guess in the early days Bitcoin was kind of worthless, so nobody bothered to save the private key on paper or so. So people just deleted the whole wallet when reinstalling windows....Bitcoins gone....

We just made sure we had a copy of our wallet.dat on a memory stick or external Hdd.
I have hundreds of them, all worthless now!

[kuriboh]

Incredible insight, if only I was lucky enough to be aware of Bitcoin back then. By the time I finally got in, in 2015,  the days of solo CPU Mining were a thing of the past. Congratulations to were involved that early, must feel good.

According to your words, I remembered a golden past. I joined the forum on May 6, 2013. I learned a lot from here by sharing many types of news and knowledge. The very happy thing was that on the 6th of May 2013, I got one BTC, and on the 13th of August, I got two BTC. It was a beautiful moment, but I sold it for a little. I would have been lucky if I had been a little more aware. Happily, I got BTC for that, too, through this forum.
CPU mining was different. It was very old when we didn't have such digital technology. Now, we take this mining thing as seriously as it was, and then it was not taken very seriously, and everyone didn't give it that much importance. Everyone looked down on it. The meagre time of that time has become like a dream of the present. Those who held on have developed their future, and those like us who could not hold on have lost the golden past.

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

If you think about Windows 2009, you can see that using the new Windows, nothing is left behind; we get everything new. Now, many things can be kept in different ways with the development of technology. Many bits have been lost like this in the past to tourize them.

[SAHASAN]

Hi there it is totally depend on computer configuration so nobody able to give perfect ans.
But that time mining was so easy.

[pooya87]

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

Bitcoin core stores the data in the same drive as your windows (C:) and I believe it always stored it in the %APPDATA% route. So when you re-install windows and format that same drive you lose all your data including your wallet file.
There was also the fact that bitcoin didn't have a price back then and was purely experimental.

Given how often computer hard drives seem to crash back in the day,

Kind of OT but were they really that bad? Maybe I was lucky because my 20 GB HDD from back in 1990's worked fine and I even still have it somewhere in the house as a relic

[TheUltraElite]

We just made sure we had a copy of our wallet.dat on a memory stick or external Hdd.
I have hundreds of them, all worthless now!

Have heard of these stories from newly joined accounts every few weeks on this forum. Someone looking for help to unlock their wallet.dat file while others scamming someone trying to "sell" their loaded wallet.dat file.

Since I started learning about bitcoin back in 2015-16 when the price was in three digits I never got to see any of that action. But reading the calculations posted on this thread, I now realize why some of the OG gamblers on Primedice and other old casinos have thousands of bitcoin gambled on their accounts and the owners made the best money out of them.

[Ratters]

Have heard of these stories from newly joined accounts every few weeks on this forum. Someone looking for help to unlock their wallet.dat file while others scamming someone trying to "sell" their loaded wallet.dat file.

Only rich people used a password! I'm not sure you could even lock the OG BitcoinQT. I think that was introduced with new Multibit wallet. I certainly never set a password for any of my QTs.

[Lucius]

Kind of OT but were they really that bad? Maybe I was lucky because my 20 GB HDD from back in 1990's worked fine and I even still have it somewhere in the house as a relic

I am sure that such things were of much better quality than they are today, because they were made to last - and today they are made to break down within a certain period of time. I also have a lot of old electronics that are over 20 years old and mostly still functional.

[Eddie Sockittome]

for instance
i just thought of random block 5000.. and looked at the what day it appeared(feb20th)
 and found first block of that day 4932 and last block of day 5048 (uk time)
meaning 116blocks that one day

there were 5 separate sequences happening that day(5 computers)
where the best sequence solved 89 of the 116 blocks

so that random day i picked, had one computer getting 89*50=4450 coin

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!

[Vincom]

There was also the fact that bitcoin didn't have a price back then and was purely experimental.

It's fascinating to look back in time and realize what we missed out on. In 2009, many of us were probably aware of BTC's existence but would rather use our PCs to play games than mine a few worthless BTC at the time. Back in 2009, those who believed in BTC's future might have only included Satoshi and a few devs with a very clear vision for the post-crisis economy.

I hope that the story of a miner who mined BTC in 2009 and became a millionaire in 2025 when 1BTC = 150K USD will soon be shared and adapted into a movie. It would be a must-watch movie as BTC sets its ATH for the season.

[SickDayIn]

It depends on the time period in 2009, as the difficulty would have been at it's lowest. It could have been possible to mine millions of coins at some stages in 2009. You might have had a lot of Bitcoin mined in this period but the average amount of Bitcoin transactions per month was less than 100.

[bg002h]

I dunno. I guess 144 blocks / a small integer number of people.

But I can say that in July 2012, my year old Mac laptop did 4 blocks in 12 hrs before difficulty adjusted.