We started a tour for the past of mining last week and this week Minerall.io will continue flashback story about – the dawn of crypto mining.
The summer of 2010 was a revelation for the market, and mining BTC began to generate income: for 1 bitcoin they gave ridiculous 10 cents (about $5 per block). And once in the industry began to appear those who earn from it, then the technology began to chase his consumers, miners.
Industrial mining was born on July 18, when the miner under the nickname ArtForz launched a farm running on a GPU and extracted the first block using the parallel computing driver OpenCL.
Bitcoin pool: the beginning
At the same time, in September 2010, Bitcoin.cz (aka Slush’s pool), the first cryptocurrency pool, was launched. Marek Palatinus, the creator of the pool, is still actively involved in the life of it. By January 2011, the pool gave 10 Gh/s of capacity. Such a speed is now seen as ridiculous, but then the difficulty of Bitcoin mining slightly exceeded 10,000 Hr/s (5,000,000 times less than now).
By February 9, the BTC rate came on a dollar, and by the summer it was already worth $20. During the day, mining brought up to $150,000, and the unit gave $1000.
Rush around mining spurred sales of video cards. By June, the difficulty exceeded 1 THr/s. It would seem that the general fever will not stop. However, the breaking of the MtGox exchange hurt the reputation of cryptocurrency and until the autumn it was all quiet in the mining.
In October (October 7th, 2011), the first fork of the BTC called LiteCoin launched – it was chosen by those who still mine on the CPU. Three years of the video card were on Olympus Mining. Ahead loomed a new jump, the complexity of the extraction of blocks was equal to 3 THr/s by the beginning of 2013.
But we will tell you about this in the next article. See you next week with a Minerall.io retrospective!