How much did it cost to mine 1 Bitcoin back in 2009?

[Crypto2077]

Just a short question, does anyone know how much did it cost to mine 1 Bitcoin back in 2009?

[Amphenomenon]

If you mean the entire cost of becoming a miner in 2009 then it was really cheap at that time since the Computational power (difficulty) was alot lower than this especially from the fact that we could mine a block with our PC which uses only CPU but as the difficulty increases, computers having GPU was uses before now that we are currently using Asic machines, while the cost of electricity also increases with this different machines/computers

Also you should note that you can't singly mine 1btc, at that time the reward for mining a block was 50 btc but currently after the 4th halving which happened this year on April 20th, the mining reward is 3.125 btc.
Bitcoin halving occur approximately after every 210,000 blocks as been mined which is currently like every 4 years

[Anthony101990Jones]

Just a short question, does anyone know how much did it cost to mine 1 Bitcoin back in 2009?

In the very early days of Bitcoin, there were no exchanges like the ones we have today. However, there was at least one exchange established in the first year since Bitcoin’s inception. The BitcoinTalk forum went online in late 2009, and soon enough, one regular member proposed the idea of an exchange where people could buy and sell Bitcoins for fiat currency.

Keep in mind that this was when the block reward for mining a Bitcoin was 50 BTC, and there were very few people mining. The BitcoinTalk forum member NewLibertyStandard set up the New Liberty Standard Exchange, and another forum user named Sirius sent him 5050 BTC in exchange for $5.02 through PayPal. This puts the first recorded price at which Bitcoin exchanged hands at $0.00099 per BTC12.

So, back in 2009, it cost very little to mine 1 Bitcoin – less than a penny! However, keep in mind that the landscape has changed significantly since then, and the cost of mining a Bitcoin today is much higher due to factors like increased competition, energy costs, and the decreasing block reward over time.

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[odolvlobo]

The cost can be estimated.

In 2009, the difficulty was 1 and the hash rate of a CPU was around 3 MH/s.

The average time in seconds takes to mine a block is estimated by: time = difficulty * 2³²  / hash rate

So, the time to mine a block of 50 BTC was about 1 * 2³²  / 3000000, or 1430 seconds. That means, 1430 seconds / 60 /60 / 50 BTC, or 0.008 hours per BTC.

A typical desktop computer might use 300 watts and at the rate of $0.10/kWh. So the cost of mining was 0.3 kW * $0.10/kWh, or $0.03/hour.

0.008 hours/BTC at a cost of $0.03/hour gives $0.00024/BTC

Feel free to verify my math.

[Rabbitqt]

Just a short question, does anyone know how much did it cost to mine 1 Bitcoin back in 2009?

I remember early on getting large power bills, where I was losing money. BTC was around $5-$8 during this time..

[tbct_mt2]

I don't know any resource to show you cost of mining 1 bitcoin in 2009, but there is information for it in 2010. It is related to the forum admin, theymos.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/su7jld/mining_250_bitcoin_with_1_computer_12_years_ago/

Around that time I measured with a Kill-A-Watt that 1 kWh could get me 160 BTC, and based on that I thought that BTC was substantially overpriced at the 5 cents or so it was trading at. As a result, I also have the honor of selling BTC at the lowest price ever recorded, $0.003/BTC. 🎉

(That "BitCoin" capitalization... such cringe...)

[Mia Chloe]

As at 2009 there were only a few miners around since Bitcoin wasn't quite popular at that time and it was just recently launched. As at 2009 Satoshi himself was an active Bitcoin miner in addition to that the reward per block at that time was 50BTC and since there were only a few miners around the available miners had an edge also coupled with the fact that the mining difficulty at that time was very low compared to now. Majority of whales now we're active miners and hodlers of but during the earliest period of Bitcoin's launch. It was during this early periods that Satoshi NAKAMOTO managed to mine over 1.1 million Bitcoins including the 50BTC he mined from the genesis block before his disappearance.

As at 2009 the dollar had a far better value than it does now which is actually because of inflation and over circulation. as at 2009 electrical cost was cheaper compared to now therefore miners had to pay little percentage of the Bitcoins they accumulated to accumulate cost and although Bitcoin price was low at that time it was cheaper.

[Yamane_Keto]

In 2009, the difficulty was 1 and the hash rate of a CPU was around 3 MH/s.

The average time in seconds takes to mine a block is estimated by: time = difficulty * 2³²  / hash rate

So, the time to mine a block of 50 BTC was about 1 * 2³²  / 3000000, or 1430 seconds. That means, 1430 seconds / 60 /60 / 50 BTC, or 0.008 hours per BTC.

1430 seconds is approximately equal to 23.83333 min, but the average time between each block in 2009 was ~ 13 minutes to ~ 18 minutes, which means the hash rate of a CPU used was higher than 3 MH/s. I searched for some old topics and found that types such as Intel(R) The Xeon(R) CPU and AMD Phenom(tm) were giving more than 6 MH/s which is what was mostly used for mining, giving us an average of less than 23 minutes.

https://data.bitcoinity.org/bitcoin/block_time/all?f=m10&t=l
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1628.0

[franky1]

if electric was $0.10/kw hour
and a desktop was 300watt/hour

1kwh=3hours 20 minutes(20 blocks*) which is
10cent for 20 blocks which is 1000btc

1cent 100btc
$0.001  10btc
$0.0001  1btc

*block per 10min avg is 20 blocks in 3 hours 20mins

[Crypto2077]

if electric was $0.10/kw hour
and a desktop was 300watt/hour

1kwh=3hours 20 minutes(20 blocks*) which is
10cent for 20 blocks which is 1000btc

1cent 100btc
$0.001  10btc
$0.0001  1btc

*block per 10min avg is 20 blocks in 3 hours 20mins

That doesn't make sense. If the production cost of 1 bitcoin was only $0.0001 in 2009 and there were 2,625,000 coins mined in 12 months, then the electricity cost was just as little as $262.50 for an entire year?

[franky1]

if electric was $0.10/kw hour
and a desktop was 300watt/hour

1kwh=3hours 20 minutes(20 blocks*) which is
10cent for 20 blocks which is 1000btc

1cent 100btc
$0.001  10btc
$0.0001  1btc

*block per 10min avg is 20 blocks in 3 hours 20mins

That doesn't make sense. If the production cost of 1 bitcoin was only $0.0001 in 2009 and there were 2,625,000 coins mined in 12 months, then the electricity cost was just as little as $262.50 for an entire year?

remember before 2010 there was no market price and wasnt popular outside of a couple dozen devs/nerds/geeks
first half of 2009 didnt even have many of them
you can look at the 'extranonce' of patoshi to see how many unique sequences(miners) there were, it wasnt many

[Hamza2424]

Just a short question, does anyone know how much did it cost to mine 1 Bitcoin back in 2009?

Keep in mind that this was when the block reward for mining a Bitcoin was 50 BTC, and there were very few people mining. The BitcoinTalk forum member NewLibertyStandard set up the New Liberty Standard Exchange, and another forum user named Sirius sent him 5050 BTC in exchange for $5.02 through PayPal. This puts the first recorded price at which Bitcoin exchanged hands at $0.00099 per BTC12.

To be honest this is not the answer to your own question because here you are mentioning Bitcoin's market price, when they made a trade it was a market price, not the production price. The price really can be calculated hehe, at least on my end because I was not familiar with Bitcoin mining and I don't know the production scenarios for Bitcoin such as machine cost, electricity costs, etc, but if we compare the production costs we can say that the production cost was negligible.

But if you have efficient input values here are the simple formulae to calculate the production cost for the Bitcoin.... I've taken it from Reddit haha and confined it with the lazy AI tools so if this formula is not efficient don't get offended just put a note for my knowledge enchantment.

Production cost = (Electricity cost * Electricity consumption * Hash power on that time) + Hardware cost. it's a general formula there are some others but it's quite simple to understand about the production cost for one block reward then simply you can divide the answer by 50 because block reward was 50 Bitcoin.

[odolvlobo]

1430 seconds is approximately equal to 23.83333 min, but the average time between each block in 2009 was ~ 13 minutes to ~ 18 minutes, which means the hash rate of a CPU used was higher than 3 MH/s.

You are looking at the total network hash rate. If 2 miners each with a 3 MH/s hash rate were mining at the same time then the network hash rate would have been 6 MH/s, but each miner would still have taken an average of 23.833 minutes to find a block.

Anyway, hash rates and electricity costs vary a lot from person to person, so there is no correct answer. Whether the miner's hash rate was 3 MH/s or 6 MH/s, the cost was still very low.

*block per 10min avg is 20 blocks in 3 hours 20mins

The average time between blocks in 2009 was much longer than 10 minutes because the network hash rate was very low and the minimum difficulty is 1. A difficulty of 1 corresponds to a network hash rate of 7.16 MH/s.