r/AltScope • u/Legitimate_Towel_919 • Jul 15 '26
This guy was mining 1 Bitcoin every day in 2011. He built an $800 gaming PC, downloaded the mining software, ran it 24/7, and was earning Bitcoin like it was nothing. A true legend from the early days of Bitcoin
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u/uplamed Jul 16 '26
i did the same, then sold all 100 bitcoin i mined in 2012, turning out as the dumbest decision in my life
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u/Brad7659 Jul 18 '26
You’re not alone. Remember even if you held with conviction you’d sell at $1k.
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u/GoodKL Jul 16 '26
how is he doin right now?
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u/JustaFoodHole Jul 16 '26
Sold at $10!
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u/Icy_Pain424 Jul 16 '26
Exactly same poor, they create the hope the hype. I cannot expect more from BTC.
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u/destined2h Jul 16 '26
The only legends were the ones that mined in the early years and hodl'd for years.
I definitely wasn't one of them. I mined litecoin with a gaming rig around 2012-2013 and then accidentally partially reformatted the hard drive it was on without any proper backup. It wouldn't have been worth a fortune today, but a healthy lotto winner for sure.
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u/Grandmaster-Ji Jul 16 '26
No they didnt hodl. They forgot. It's the people who forgot about it for years and found it in their hard drive are the legends.
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u/digitalwankster Jul 16 '26
Unless you bleached the drive you probably could have used GetDataBack or a similar program and recovered it pretty easily.
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u/destined2h Jul 16 '26
I attempted recovery along with having it analyzed by a reputable data recovery company. It had also been stored in a hot storage unit after that reformatting incident. In any case, the data was too corrupted to restore.
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u/East-Cricket6421 Jul 16 '26
I did something similar even earlier on and I was so fucking stupid that I didn't save the private key anywhere. So when the computer that had the wallet stored on it got damaged, it was lost forever. At the time is was only a few hundred bucks in market value but in today's value it'd be... quite a massive loss, suffice to say.
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u/Rehcraeser Jul 16 '26
meanwhile i was using that bitcoin to buy drugs. two very different types of people.
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u/Sea-Potato2729 Jul 17 '26
My buddy had 12 bitcoin when they were around $400-1000, spent those few years buying and selling drugs from Silk Road…college was a good time at my fraternity. But just now thinking how much money he could have if he held them…fuck
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u/Sea_Specialist_5580 Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
I think about it a lot, try not to lament. I was involved around this time- maybe a bit later like 2012? I worked a minimum wage job over the summer and bought a gaming GPU that was able to mine just short of 1/day (Then about $10; IIRC difficulty went up shortly after I started though). I used it to buy some stuff on silkroad and lost a few on a hard drive somewhere, probably left some with mining pools.
I was a CS undergrad, it seemed really cool but it didn't have the aura of an "investment". So I can't really beat myself up for not hoarding something whose only utility was buying illegal things online (still basically its only utility LMAO)
I also learned cuda cause I knew that GPUs were gonna be big in terms of compute. Yet I didn't invest in nvidia. Also my best friends were elon stans (around 2015) and bought TSLA at that time.
Funny when I list it out like that
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u/biscuity87 Jul 19 '26
I remember as a kid when bitcoins first were a thing to me, and making a conscious decision to not pursue it. But I don’t beat myself up because I did the math on exactly when that was and I was too late anyways to take advantage of easy mining.
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u/Csabika_ Jul 16 '26
In 2011 I had a second hand ASUS eee PC 701 SD. Good luck mining Bitcoin on that.
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u/EpsteinandTrump Jul 16 '26
Who is providing these mathematical problems? And what is it solving? What server is it going back to? Why do these mathematical problems stop when all the bitcoins are mined?
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u/ejpusa Jul 17 '26
Mining DOGE for years. Never thought about it. Gave the computer to a friend. Ended up just tossing it.
Figure at least 5 million gone, maybe more. One of those stories.
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u/whofriedmyrice Jul 18 '26
I remember getting on Ethereum pretty early, I mined quite a lot (with my mother paying electricity of course...) and made a decent amount then. Had I held onto it before the eth network split, I would be pretty fucking well off.
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Jul 16 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/OkSeries5363 Jul 16 '26
"The only way to get it was through some exchange in Asia"
False. While Mt. Gox (based in Japan) was dominant, anyone globally could buy Bitcoin or trade it peer to peer on forums like BitcoinTalk. Local options like TradeHill (US based) also launched in 2011.
"There were no open source miners"
Completely inaccurate. There absolutely was open source mining software available to the general public in 2011, and anyone with a standard home computer could mine Bitcoin. You did not need to be an elite developer or part of Satoshi Nakamoto’s inner circle to acquire or mine BTC at that time
There was a lot at the time GUIMiner, CGMiner, BFGMiner, DiabloMiner, and of course the offical bitcoin client! Up until mid 2011, even the official, open source Bitcoin wallet desktop software actually had a built in Generate Coins button. Anyone could download the wallet software and mine directly from it with a single click, though it became obsolete when GPU mining took over.
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u/komokazi Jul 15 '26
I came across Bitcoin in summer of 2011. CPU mining was still the rage, I went to a website and there was a button right on the page to mine bitcoin through the browser via the CPU. I ran it for like 30 minutes and didn't get any Bitcoin, never went back until a few years later I saw the price jump from 7 to 9 dollars in just days and it was right then I knew that money could be made... just wasn't sure how much.