An old post from a Bitcoin forum from September 2010 has recently drawn renewed attention from the market. The post shows that during a time when Bitcoin had almost no real market price, early users were already seriously calculating the cost of electricity for mining on home computers and discussing whether it was worthwhile to do so.
The electricity cost for a single block is approximately $5.68.
The poster, TTBit, measured the power consumption of the computer using a wattmeter and found that after turning off the monitor, the total power consumption of the machine was about 140 watts. Based on this measurement, the computing power of this computer is estimated to be around 2200 kilohashes per second.
Considering the network conditions at that time, TTBit estimated that it would take about 14 days and 2 hours to mine a block. The entire process would consume approximately 47.3 kilowatt-hours of electricity. If calculated at $0.12 per kilowatt-hour, the electricity cost would be around $5.68.
At that time, the Bitcoin block reward was 50 BTC, but this user still referred to this setup as "losing money." This also reflects that in 2010, Bitcoin had not yet developed its current market value, and miners' assessments of returns were completely different from those of today.
The forum has started discussing GPU mining.
This post also records the early stages of the transition in Bitcoin mining from CPU to GPU. TTBit mentions that some users used CUDA software in conjunction with graphics cards, achieving a computing power of 25,000 hashes per second, which is significantly higher than that of ordinary CPU.
Another participant mentioned that a Nvidia GTX 260 graphics card can achieve 33,000 hashes per second with a power consumption of about 200 watts. This efficiency is much higher than that of household CPU GPUs, and it also makes mining with GPU economically viable.
At that time, it was judged that if the total power consumption of the graphics card device could be controlled below about 1000 watts, GPU mining might become profitable again.
Satoshi Nakamoto also participated in the discussion.
This post also attracted the participation of Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of Bitcoin. It is mentioned in the post that Nakamoto estimates that the computing power of a system with 24 cores and AMD can reach approximately 66,000 hashes per second.
TTBit also attempted to estimate the network difficulty at the end of 2010, predicting that it might rise to around 6672. Another forum user believed that this figure might actually be conservative. TTBit wrote at that time that if this trend continues, it will become quite difficult to generate new coins in the future.
Looking at the subsequent development, this judgment is largely valid. As the difficulty continued to increase, with the widespread adoption of GPU and later the emergence of ASIC mining machines, Bitcoin mining quickly evolved from a personal computer experiment into a highly specialized global industry.
