The Beginning of GPU Mining for Bitcoin

Came across this awesome animation showing when GPU mining officially kicked off for Bitcoin back in 2010. Anyone here from that era? How did they roll out the GPU mining software? Was it a big reveal or just thrown out there for everyone? Watching that animation is wild, seeing the 2.5-minute block times and the difficulty limit set at 300% (which Satoshi apparently put in place). Man, it would’ve been great to know about Bitcoin back in those days.

I started Mining Bitcoin with the GPU back in 2012/2013 and there was already the difficulty very high. A few month later i already got one of the USB Stick Miners. The most problem back in this days was that there was not really an Info about how to setup the Software or the commands for. It was in the beginning a lot of testing with different parameters and command lines for the miner software. After a few tests i was running the miner with crazy overclock settings and burned my GPU and also the power supply. The good old days

I never mined bitcoin with gpus but I mined Litecoin / dogecoin which was scrypt algo and it was very power hungry. Back then psus were expensive and capacity wasn’t as high as today. The best bang for the buck was a 750Watt PSU. So I had a rig which basically only had 2 Gpus inside it and it was pulling 700 watts. So pretty much at capacity. With ETH mining, I think with the same Psu I was able to mine with 4 gpus. Crazy how much power they used.

Litecoin mining with 280x/290 was a blast. I had my 290s flashed to 390 firmware which "unlocked" them and increased the hashrate. I think the wattage was above 200w per card and you had free house heating from the rig. Those cards were power hungry AS FUCK. Good times

I was mining Ethereum on these cards and it was profitable at the end of 2015. Before this, these video cards were used in mining other shitcoins, the names of which are now difficult to remember. But electricity was very cheap and there was no control over consumption in private houses and apartments.

litecoin, feathercoin, siacoin comes to mind

Good old days indeed, I remember mining: 42coin Blackcoin when it was in its POW stage Who remember these exchange: Crypsty Mintpal

Cointellect was in 2014. It seems that they were mining Dogecoin, but they paid very large rewards for referral links and it would be profitable to mine using them. This project did not last long, but information from 2014 can be found on the forums.

Hell yeah i got a few Vapor 270x mining Litecoin and Doge and if i remember right at this time also Worldcoin and few other Shitcoins  They was for sure very power hungry but the one of the best cards at this time. Who dont remember this Exchange ? I still got the bookmark in my Browser favorites as a reminder of it and that it was the first time i lost all my coins there. And next to it the first bookmark from Bitstamp with at this time the AH price from Bitcoin  Source : Screenshot from my Browser

Yeah 42coin, sounds familar. Is that the coin with max supply 42 coins and it basically traded in small fractions. Something like 0.0000020 was worth like $10. This coin traded for years I remember. Pretty sure it was just a clone of Litecoin and nothing more with an extremely small supply. Yeah cryptsy. I knew things were bad for that exchange when they had good arb opportunities. Only you later learned that you couldn’t withdraw certain coins. So people would sell their good coins like bitcoin at a huge loss only to withdraw with an alt coin which still had some supply in its hot wallet. Is this the exchange where the owner was in jail and before he went to jailed he filled up his hot wallets and when they were empty some one had to visit him so he could refill them from their cold storage?

My first mining GPU was also R9 270X, it was 10 years ago - https://youtube.com/shorts/BeKb_XOOoFY

remember btc-e? they're the reason I'm getting 100 phishing emails a day. thanks btc-e!

Yeah the good old days , i have a lot of memories when i think back to this time and a lot of pain how difficult sometimes the things was to set it up. Really nice short video Dowper_ , saddly i havnt made any pictures oder videos from my setup at this time. Hell yeah , not only btc-e , there was so many (now we would say crap exchanges) at that time. But for me the most painful and disappointed one was Crypsty.

Owner of bitcoin mined big portion of cake in the begining knowing what he or they were doing.imagine being rewarded 25BTC every 5-10minutes with regular pc. They got millions BTC maybe with just 10pcs in couple of months. Smartest move ever in history.

I think the biggest headache of mining in 2014 was that USB risers weren’t mainstream back then. You had ribbon risers and those were a big pain. I had some low end gpus like Radeon 6870, 6950, 7850, 7870, etc and they were very profitable and didn’t use as much power as a 280x or r9 290. So I tried to use 5 of them in a single rig and due to the ribbon length it was difficult getting them mounted with each space so they didn’t over heat. So I had one physically inside the x16 slot on the motherboard and the other were all hanging above it and there was 2 gpus that would run super hot due to the bad clearance and poor ventilation. With usb risers it would make the job so much easier but they were introduced when the market topped and everything was going downhill.

Big Wern fu..ing big scammer .Only Cryptsy had autoexchange function. I lost big amount.Mined scrypt algo with 6950-7950,290-280x , still have some doges from them