A brief history of bitcoin mining hardware
By Tristan Greene
Bitcoin mining was once nothing more than a lucrative hobby for nerdy cryptocurrency enthusiasts. The only hardware required, in the beginning, was a simple computer. Things have changed a lot in less than 10 years.
In 2009 the first bitcoin miners used standard multi-core CPUs to produce BTC at a rate of 50 per block. If you had a couple computers lying around with decent specs you could have earned about five dollars a day. The difficulty of mining (amount of computing power necessary) was so low then it was worth it for hobbyists and crypto nerds to participate.
Today, mining 50 BTC would reward you in excess of $434,000 per block. A little over a month ago, when it was trading at nearly $20K, that same nerdy “hobby” would have netted you nearly a million dollars a pop.
But, if you are going to hop in your time machine don’t go back to ancient 2009. It was a strange time where people used GPUs to play video games, instead of playing them with cardboard like we do in the present. So, we’d suggest dialing your Delorean’s date display to 2010 — and bring pizza.
