We've all heard a lot of stories from people who bought or mined BTC in the past, but it's always nostalgic to remember. "What if" might be a depressing memory, but it can also be a powerful motivator.
In this story, let's take a look at the question: What if you mined BTC in 2010? How much would it be worth now?
One thing must be clear - the following assumption does not take into consideration the technical specifications which can vary widely, but rather the comment of someone who was an active miner during the Satoshi era, using a Pentium processor and revealing their process in a conversation with Satoshi Nakamoto.
A conversation with Satoshi
Satoshi Nakamoto - the pseudonym creator of Bitcoin - has been inactive for years, but in 2010 he was very active. Bitcoiners like to go back to some of the conversations he had with early adopters in the early days of the protocol, and that's what we're going to do now.
Bitcointalk was the preliminary source of information at the time and also the preferred conversation platform. In this particular thread, Satoshi talked about the first automatic proof-of-work network difficulty adjustment which took place on December 30, 2009.
“We had our first automatic proof-of-work difficulty adjustment on December 30, 2009.
The minimum difficulty is 32-bit zero, so even if only one person was managing a node, the difficulty doesn't get any easier than that. For most of the past year, we have been hovering below the minimum. On December 30th we passed it and the algorithm adapted to greater difficulty. Since then it has become more difficult with each adjustment ”.
For those of you who may not be aware, the Bitcoin network adjusts itself proportionally to the total effort spent across the network. So if the number of nodes increases, the difficulty will also increase.
One user observed that it generated five Bitcoin blocks in one day using a Pentium processor.
This was written in 2010 in response to the difficulty adjustment thread. For context - miners back then were receiving 50 BTC for successfully adding a block to the network, as the network had not yet undergone the subsequent halving events.
Every four years or so, the BTC network goes through a halving where the block reward is halved. At the time of writing this article, miners are getting 6,25 BTC per block.
250 BTC mined in one day - currently worth $ 11 million
A quick calculation shows us that the user received 250 BTC in one day, undermining BTC on his Pentium processor.
It is difficult to determine the exact price of the coins back then, but it is likely that each BTC was worth pennies if it had been tradable. Fast forward to February 2022, 250 BTC is worth just under $ 11 million a year quotation current.
That's a lot of money, but it's also incredibly difficult to assume that someone would be holding this amount of BTC all that time.
