Why is Difficulty exactly 1 until Dec 29th 2009?

[wingding]

I checked the numbers at  http://blockexplorer.com/q/nethash/ : after Dec 29 2009 the difficulty is given in decimals but before that date, it is exactly 1. Why?

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[benjyz]

We had our first automatic adjustment of the proof-of-work difficulty on 30 Dec 2009. 

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=43.msg249

[gmaxwell]

Because it should have been lower based on the hashrate, but the system imposes a minimum (which is the definition of difficulty 1).

[benjyz]

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Bitcoin

It is a curious coincidence that somebody turned on a GPU or CPU farm on 30/12/2009, but that is what happened. So the date itself is just to the date when Bitcoin really took off. As far as I can tell before that date interest was extremely low, and even most people who had interest from the beginning thought it was kind of dead or something. Most developers who are active now got involved in 2010, except Mike Hearn (AFAIK). Martti Malmi did the Linux version in 2009. The first "real exchange" happened in February 2010. Once you have an exchange rate it wasn't so abstract anymore. Only 12 months later the rate climbed up to 1$. So from the first exchange on, the growth was always exponential. In other words hashing power / difficulty and the exchange rate track quite closely.

[benjyz]

by the way here is a graph

also here the line of code which sets the minimum to 1.0:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/0514fb3b4cd4e2923d9fdddec84da0c4abcf3e5f/src/rpcblockchain.cpp#L26

[roslinpl]

It would be nice to mine @Diff 1 with rigs from today

Hah
All blocks would be mine! :]

[mmitech]

It would be nice to mine @Diff 1 with rigs from today

Hah
All blocks would be mine! :]

if you had a 1TH/s machine in 2009, you would mine all the first 2016 Block really quick, then the difficulty would jump where it should be in order to get 10min average blocks rate..... I am not sure what is the maximum difficulty jump at once, I have to check that up.

although you would have the majority of the network hashrate, you could do what ever you want assuming you know how to.... which makes me think about how lucky and thankful we are that Bitcoin is still alive today.

[jl2012]

It would be nice to mine @Diff 1 with rigs from today

Hah
All blocks would be mine! :]

if you had a 1TH/s machine in 2009, you would mine all the first 2016 Block really quick, then the difficulty would jump where it should be in order to get 10min average blocks rate..... I am not sure what is the maximum difficulty jump at once, I have to check that up.

although you would have the majority of the network hashrate, you could do what ever you want assuming you know how to.... which makes me think about how lucky and thankful we are that Bitcoin is still alive today.

Not exactly. The difficulty would jump only 4x at maximum, so that would be 1->4->16->64->......... until it's 10min average

[timk225]

First GPU miner in Open CL didn't come around until July 2010.

[wingding]

First GPU miner in Open CL didn't come around until July 2010.

Seems so! I have plotted a closeup of the same graph as benjyz showed here:


upload image

[Shogen]

It would be nice to mine @Diff 1 with rigs from today

Hah
All blocks would be mine! :]

if you had a 1TH/s machine in 2009, you would mine all the first 2016 Block really quick, then the difficulty would jump where it should be in order to get 10min average blocks rate..... I am not sure what is the maximum difficulty jump at once, I have to check that up.

although you would have the majority of the network hashrate, you could do what ever you want assuming you know how to.... which makes me think about how lucky and thankful we are that Bitcoin is still alive today.

Not exactly. The difficulty would jump only 4x at maximum, so that would be 1->4->16->64->......... until it's 10min average

This is the first time I have heard of this 4x maximum adjustment. 

[digitalninja81]

It would be nice to mine @Diff 1 with rigs from today

Hah
All blocks would be mine! :]

if you had a 1TH/s machine in 2009, you would mine all the first 2016 Block really quick, then the difficulty would jump where it should be in order to get 10min average blocks rate..... I am not sure what is the maximum difficulty jump at once, I have to check that up.

although you would have the majority of the network hashrate, you could do what ever you want assuming you know how to.... which makes me think about how lucky and thankful we are that Bitcoin is still alive today.

Not exactly. The difficulty would jump only 4x at maximum, so that would be 1->4->16->64->......... until it's 10min average

This is the first time I have heard of this 4x maximum adjustment. 

This is the first time I have heard about all of this

[dserrano5]

This is the first time I have heard of this 4x maximum adjustment. 

This is the first time I have heard about all of this

That's good. Regular bitcoin users don't need to know these things. Ideally the whole concept of mining shouldn't even exist among the population.