I remembered what my first mining pool was called today
Hey everyone!
As I was watching the video of Dan's presentation of EOS (which can be found on @matt-a's page) he mentioned that he started mining BTC back in 2009 when he was still solving blocks with a CPU miner.
[Thumbnail, surprised Michael Scott from The Office.]
It got me thinking to my early days of getting into Bitcoin. I remember the 2 digit dollar price and what seemed to be soaring upwards back then. After reading more about it and also becoming interested in mining it, I thought why not test it out. A GPU miner was pretty new back then for bitcoin I believe, unfortunately all I had to mine it with back then was a laptop GPU miner, worst of all it was NVidia which has proven to not be as efficient at providing hashpower as its counter AMD.
I remembered mining it for fun for a few weeks, then summer came along and I didn't want to risk my PC getting damaged so I stopped. The mining pool was called Slush, here is my confirmation email from back then.
I knew that I hadn't mined much but I had a feeling that I never withdrew it, this got me a little excited considering how high it has soared lately (yes I still think its valued a lot even after the last couple days of correction). I quickly googled the site and was relieved to find it was still operational and even had upgraded its front-end!
Of course I didn't remember the password to it anymore, so I used the reset password option while crossing my thumbs hoping my information was still saved there.
I was still a bit worried here cause many sites tell you they sent the reset email even if you never had an account with them. The first screenshot in this post I snapped later when I remembered I could just search for the pool name in my email.
Lo and behold, it worked!
I quickly entered a random password twice into the field and success!
Now came the moment of truth! How much BTC had I mined and what were they worth today!?
Tadaa! A really nice sum considering how little hashpower I had compared to the rest of the network back then, but I guess its also thanks to blocks being rewarded 25 BTC instead of now 12.5 at the time.
Thinking back to Dan's speech, and comparing it to the prices now it kinda leaves you speechless. That people were mining 50 BTC blocks back then every 10 minutes with their CPU hashpower only, wow. Imagine the first person to mine it alone (Satoshi Nakamoto) was receiving over 100k $ per 10 minutes by having his computer do math, basically.
I wanted to end this with a chart of bitcoins all time chart, looking at it now it makes a lot of sense why the price acts like it does today, but then again you have to remember how unpredictable this market can be because of its innovation and adaption rate. Who knows if this was the All Time High for now or if its just a small correction followed by a new ATH shortly.
All I know is that Bitcoin is the first and oldest cryptocurrency, followed by a much younger Ethereum and an even younger Steem. The innovation itself is still very young and just now started to receive more attention across the world.
@tipu curate