In #Bitcoin’s earliest days, mining didn’t require warehouses of #ASICs. You could earn 50 BTC by clicking “Generate Coins” on your home computer. Few recognised value in something that appeared worthless, but those early clicks helped secure a revolution.
Art by Caspian Ievers, with insights from Sergio Demian Lerner
Bitcoin mining today evokes vast data centres, but in 2009 it was far simpler. The first #BitcoinWallet, built by #Satoshi, let anyone mine with a couple of clicks. His readme.txt explained that users could support the network by running a node and keeping “Generate Coins” enabled. Blocks could take days or months to find, but mining ran quietly in the background.
Notably, Satoshi didn’t use the term “mining” at all. He called it “generating,” and early users could generate coins with no cost beyond their computer’s idle time. Most of these early “zero-value” coins are believed to have been mined by Satoshi. Researcher Sergio Demian Lerner identified a unique fingerprint showing that a single entity mined roughly 1.1M BTC in 2009–2010. He argues that Satoshi’s concentrated hashrate was likely essential to protect the network when it was most vulnerable.
Satoshi gradually stepped back as new miners arrived, decentralising the network at the moment it became secure enough to stand on its own. And he encouraged others to participate, writing: “As a reward for supporting the network, you receive coins when you successfully generate a block.”
Mining on a home computer remained viable until late 2009, when difficulty began to rise. Yet very few people used the feature. One early #Bitcointalk user later reflected: “Remember when mining BTC was as easy as ‘click generate’? Even then, very few did, and most didn’t do it for long.”
Satoshi didn’t just create a peer-to-peer money system, he designed a fair way for anyone to help secure it, long before today’s industrial mining landscape.
Read the full article:
https://www.historyofbitcoin.io/timeline/generate-coins
This artwork, “GENERATE COINS,” appears in the History of Bitcoin Collector’s Book and on the interactive timeline.
#BitcoinArt #Art
https://blossom.primal.net/d1b81368072708e701d00da64243c0ab960bd3fa15c0416202abe2c08510e988.mp4
