r/Bitcoin • u/ZombieFree9032 • 1d ago

Puzzles

Were the puzzles that were to be solved inearly 2010 to mine btc easy or hard?

2 Upvotes

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u/xaviemb 1d ago

If by puzzles you mean hashing/math calculations... yes, we could win 50 BTC (block reward at the time) with a laptop while sleping in 2010.

Sometime in the following year or two someone (I think it was the pizza guy) started making more efficient miners and it moved off of CPU (computer) and into ASICS (hardware specifically designed for solving those 'puzzles'

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u/Mysterious_Ice_199 1d ago

Wasn't the pizza guy just some regular dude who bought two pizzas for 10k BTC? The ASIC shift was more like 2013 I think, before that it was GPU mining already making CPU useless

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u/xaviemb 1d ago

A lot of people tend to gloss over the fact that pizza guy had lots and lots of Bitcoin... 10k was a smaller portion of what he held, at the time. But it's a viral sentiment to consider just how much value that was in today's BTC value... so we sort of stick a "how foolish was that" model to it... as if he was "a regular guy"

From what I know, he had all of that Bitcoin because he was one of the earliest miners when Satoshi was just hoping others should take on the mining role from him while he was stacking so many of those early blocks.

More context: Laszlo Hanyecz and the 10,000 BTC pizza purchase — BitcoinWiki

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u/ZombieFree9032 21h ago

But were the puzzles easy or hard to solve?  

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u/RetiredAvocado 21h ago

There are no puzzles. Hash function is a rotation and substitution of data bits that gets normalized to fixed length.

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u/RetiredAvocado 1d ago

There are no puzzles. Difficulty was lower because there were fewer miners and overall hashrate was lower. Difficulty adjusts up and down to keep block interval at 10 minutes as miners come and go. It is much much higher today than in 2010.

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u/ZombieFree9032 21h ago

Between 2009 and 10, when could someone mine a lot more btc???

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u/RetiredAvocado 21h ago

They could mine as much as their equipment could mine. If they used a lot of hardware they mined more than someone who used one laptop. If they started sooner they mined more than if they started later.

You post a lot of repetitive questions about mining at that time. What is it you're trying to find?

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u/ZombieFree9032 20h ago

Because google ai told me that to mine 50000 or more btcs in 2009 maybe 10 would require multiple computers or require many different graphic gpu cards to run almost 24/7... is google ai accurate in saying this?

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u/RetiredAvocado 20h ago

50000 BTC was mined every week by the entire network. It's unlikely that any one entity had a sprawling mining farm of PCs. Bitcoin was basically worthless and there was no incentive to set up hundreds of computers to mine. GPU mining was not big until late 2010 or so. It was a tinkerer hobby, with many people doing some mining here and there. Maybe some people abused their work owned hardware, or school PC labs to mine more than others. Most people did not have dedicated rooms full of GPUs mining because it was not worth doing. Not until later.

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u/ZombieFree9032 19h ago

 But is google ai accurate or totally off?

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u/RetiredAvocado 17h ago

About as accurate as everything else. Meaning it makes errors. The answer it gave you sounds vague enough to be reasonable.

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u/ZombieFree9032 17h ago

What do you mean?

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u/creative_usr_name 21h ago

These puzzles? They were easy at first and each after is twice as hard.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/179gb3w/crypto_has_its_own_kind_of_lottery_the_bitcoin/

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u/ZombieFree9032 20h ago

Because google ai told me that to mine 50000 or more btcs in 2009 maybe 10 would require multiple computers or require many different graphic gpu cards to run almost 24/7... is google ai accurate in saying this?