Topic: How did we do at the beginning to have bitcoins? (2010-2011 ...) - page 2. (Read 281 times)

I did not join the Bitcoin space too early, and by the time I joined Bitcoin, there was no better way to earn Bitcoin unless you were buying from CEX or via P2P. My first Bitcoin was bought in around 2019/2020, and I bought the bitcoin on a centralised exchange with my Debit card. I can't remember the name correctly of the CEX, but still back in 2020, I also bought some Bitcoin on Binance.

No, it wasn't so difficult to use,
Bitcoin Core is basically still the same as Bitcoin QT,  it hasn't changed much in terms of user friendlyness.

Sure, there's a lot more Wallets today and some of them might be more user friendly than others,
but that doesn't mean it was difficult to use in the early days, using it was always as easy as using email. Do you think email is difficult to use?

The difficult part in bitcoin was never its usage, but to understand it, what it is, how it works,..
to wrap your head around it, that's the hard part and that didn't change at all.


Mobile device? When did anyone actually use a mobile device to mine bitcoin?
As a proof-of-concept ....maybe, like that guy that mined with a pencil and a piece of paper.

In 2010 "mining" was just an optional setting within the Bitcoin QT wallet that you could activate.
If you did, your CPU mined blocks working in the background.

Some smart people tried (and succeeded) to optimize that process and wrote their own mining software, which was faster than Bitcoin QT.
If I remember correctly the first public GPU-mining-software came out around october 2010, GPUs were a LOT faster than CPUs so people started to use those.
Then in 2011 came FPGAs, not that much faster than GPUs but a lot more energy-efficient
and in 2013 the ASIC-era began.

I've never heard of mobile mining devices,
every "app" that tricked people into "bitcoin mining" was a scam.

If I have to guess How did you do at the beginning to have bitcoins and how were they kept, it was simple that most of them preferred to mine and keep it in their wallets which were installed in their systems that were supposed to mine. Every Mining tutorial asked users to install a Bitcoin Wallet and that Bitcoin wallet was used to store the Bitcoins which they received after mining. Some of the users which joined a bit later had to buy it from an exchange called Mt.Gox which literally ran away with the user funds. So I guess those who mined themselves are bit safer and might have more chance of holding them since 2011-12.

A BIP is a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal and they are implemented to improve the Bitcoin network. BIP39 was implemented around 2013.
There are many BIPs which were implemented later on after the creation of Bitcoin.

In the really early days there were no exchanges and people for Bitcoin by mining them, this could have been eaisly done using a mobile device. And it was possible to transfer bitcoins from wallet to wallet before BIP39.

You pointed out a great question but i think the previous member has already answered your query. But, i think many member used to create their own wallet address using their computing power and then they use that same Wallets which is aforementioned to send and receive BTC.

I also sometimes think, why the adoption rate was lower back in days because it was so difficult to use and keep the BTC in your wallets and on any exchanges (like MT GOX) but as of now many exchanges and Wallets have User friendly interface which every buddy understand easily and liked too.

Just like in your last Topic you just created, where you share your experience like how newbies prefer to use CEXs just because they sometimes do not like the technological terms included in Hardware wallets or in DEXs (as most of the DEXs have no User Friendly Interface). The point is, what if the current people who find current apps and technologies still hard to learn due to their interfaces then how would these people will survive or able to use the same technology back in 2010?

Well, thank God to all developer who came into market with such software like SVP wallets and User friendly, CEXS and DEXs.

It's always been easy, or at least not hard, or complicated at all.

How we got them?
We bought/exchanged them from people who owned some, like right here in this forums marketplace-section, in exchange for some pizza for examle, the irc-channel was also a place to meet fellow bitcoiners,
or we just mined them ourselves, which in 2010 was quite easy even on low-end-CPUs.

How we kept them?
Bitcoin QT, the wallet known today as Bitcoin Core, was the only wallet around in 2010.
In late 2011 Electrum came around and lots of others followed.

We had no seeds back then, but a backup of our wallet.dat-files, or even just the private keys did the same,
seeds are just more convenient to handle.

Hello,

Today there are a thousand and one ways to obtain bitcoin, CEX, PtoP exchanges etc ... I read that the concept of seed and BIP39 was proposed later. This is all a bit confusing to me.

How did you do at the beginning to have bitcoins and how were they kept? I guess it was reserved for the rather computer-savvy people? When did it get easier?

Thank you