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How long did it take the 1st BTC to be mined?
17 sats \ 2 comments \ @locomancell 26 Aug 2023 bitcoin
I asked AI how long would it take the very first computer to mine 1 BTC and it came out with this with a slightly different answer than my question but interesting enough 🤔 The very first computer, known as the "Satoshi Nakamoto's computer," used for mining Bitcoin is estimated to have had a processing power of around 3,000,000 hashes per second (3 MH/s).
In the early days of Bitcoin, the difficulty level was much lower, and mining a block required significantly less computational power compared to today. The average time it took to mine a block was around 10 minutes.
To mine 1 BTC block, the miner needs to find a specific hash that meets the requirements set by the Bitcoin network. The probability of finding such a hash is determined by the miner's computational power relative to the total network hash rate.
Given the estimated processing power of the first computer, it would have taken a considerable amount of time to mine a block. However, it is challenging to provide an exact timeframe as multiple factors, such as network difficulty adjustments, can affect mining time.
Nonetheless, considering the early network difficulty and the processing power of the first computer, it is reasonable to assume that it would have taken a significant amount of time, possibly days or even weeks, to mine a single BTC block.
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42 sats \ 0 replies \ @nullama 26 Aug 2023
A couple of things.
  • Bitcoin mining requires a previous block, so genesis block was required.
  • The first block is special, it's genesis. The reward of it is not spendable.
  • There is no mining of the first 1 BTC, the first block got 50 BTC as reward, not 1.
  • The difficulty was set at 1. For comparison, right now the difficulty is 55.62 T, that is 55620000000000.
  • In that first block, there is this message: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"
  • That block was mined on 3 January 2009.
  • 6 days later the second block was mined as the Bitcoin client was released that day
And this is what Hal Finney said:
As an amusing thought experiment, imagine that Bitcoin is successful and becomes the dominant payment system in use throughout the world. Then the total value of the currency should be equal to the total value of all the wealth in the world. Current estimates of total worldwide household wealth that I have found range from $100 trillion to $300 trillion. With 20 million coins, that gives each coin a value of about $10 million.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @0fje0 26 Aug 2023
How long did it take the 1st BTC to be mined?
Another nerdy, kinda philosophical, way to answer the question is that it took around 13.787 ± 0.020 billion years.
That's if you take into consideration all that was necessary to have been invented by the time Satoshi could create the genesis block.
The extra 6 days it took to actually mine the first bitcoin then becomes a rounding error at best.
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