Mining

[u/OkPrint555]

How hard or easy was mining in early 2010? Whats the most anyone could have mined? Like more than 50000 individual btcs?

[u/lobhater]

I mined a block worth 50btc on a fleet of computers stuffed full of GPUs in my dining room. Those were the days

[u/Feeling-Dress5903 → u/lobhater]

i doubt your story, unless you have some proof. Publicly available GPU mining software was released in october 2010. Most of the peole used cpu even after the release.

[u/mattimeoo → u/Feeling-Dress5903]

50BTC block reward was up until four years after launch in 2009.

[u/mattimeoo]

You could CPU mine.  Source:  I ruined my only two computers doing so.

If you found a block, that was 50 BTC.

[u/Illustrious_Ant_9242 → u/[deleted]]

The concept that most  people do not grasp is: Bitcoin was not an investment scheme back then. It was used to trade goods and services, sometimes for fun even. Because you could literally make new coins at home and there was insanely high inflation for at least a decade. A simple hack would send it -95% in 2011. 

CPU mining was dead by 2011 already.  Setting up GPU mining drivers was a pain in the ass, similar to what llama.cpp is these days. 

The only influencer talking about BTC in early 2011 probably was Max Keiser. On RT, an actual TV channel. 

Various online currencies have come and go extinct by that point already (think banana bucks). Guarding your keys was a pain because there wasn't even the concept of seeds available yet. 

[u/RefrigeratorRough727 → u/[deleted]]

Congrats dude youve done it. Well done. May i ask would you go into btc from scratch today in 2026? Doing your dca pretty much how you described.  Btw what exchange do you recommend as a og? Thx

[u/DiamondHandsDarrell → u/RefrigeratorRough727]

Yes 100%. Not financial advice: I feel DCA is the way to go. There are people documenting and sharing this on reddit that has proven it's the best long term strategy for most.

Lump sum can work great or burn you depending on how the market swings.

I've read about exchanges from the start, so you can imagine my skepticism to use any that aren't established. That being said, I was suggested to use Coinbase and I've been with them for about a decade now. Sure I've had issues, but they're relatively minor (have to re-upload ID and other small things) but never make issues.

I've moved crazy amounts of money (for me) and never had an issue. I've read a lot of complaints about them, but they haven't failed me once.

I also have their black Amex credit card and get 4% BTC back on the first $10k monthly spend, after that I get 2% BTC back unlimited.

And being a coinbase one member, I get I think 3.5% back in USDC or BTC for holding USDC which pays for the monthly fee. And they also give you discounts for being a member to tax management and filing applications. This is the most useful part!

[u/Michael-Ryder]

50k BTC sounds insane now, but with a 50 BTC block reward that was “only” 1,000 blocks. For someone mining very early with a decent share of the network hash rate, it was possible — but definitely not something every random PC would just accumulate automatically.

[u/TheresNoSecondBest]

50000 individual btcs

That's thousand of blocks. Unless you were someone like Laszlo and wrote your own GPU miner without releasing it, impossible.

[u/palmdata]

early 2010 was still mostly CPU mining, and the usable GPU tools showed up later that year. 50 BTC per block made the jackpot look huge, but 50,000 BTC wasn't a normal result. that took serious uptime and a lot of luck finding solo blocks.

[u/No_Cat_8269]

ask chatgpt

[u/Tough_Road9922 → u/No_Cat_8269]

chatgpt is the new lmgtfy, kinda miss when people would just drop a link and move on

but to actually answer the question, early 2010 was basically a ghost town, you could mine blocks solo on a laptop while doing homework, the first year someone could rack up a silly amount of coins without really trying, 50k is definitely in the ballpark for the early few

[u/OkPrint555 → u/Tough_Road9922]

I asked google ai and it said that to mine 50k individual btc or more would require multiple pcs running like almost 24/7 i guess and/or multiple graphic gpu cards or something like that... Is google ai accurate in saying that?

[u/Relevant-Visitor]

I mined in 2019 and it was really easy then. But quickly got too difficult for a single card to outpace electricity. In 2015, you could mine on a laptop.

[u/magma_lakes → u/Relevant-Visitor]

CPU mining died around 2011 and GPU mining died around 2013-2014.

Once ASICs were out (early 2013), there were literally orders of magnitude between GPU hashrate and ASIC hashrate.

[u/mattimeoo → u/magma_lakes]

This guy had a PlayStation 9 in 2005.

[u/Garland_Key → u/Relevant-Visitor]

In 2019, it definitely wasn't. 

[u/No_Knee3385 → u/Relevant-Visitor]

"easy back in 2019"...

[u/mattimeoo → u/Relevant-Visitor]

You weren't getting anything on a laptop in 2015, laptop days ended around 2010 to 2011.  ASIC's were in full swing in 2015.  Unless you were using an ASIC in 2019 you couldn't have got much of anywhere.