CPUs were mining for approximately 2 years before GPU mining started. The first GPU miner was known to keep the mining software to himself and mined a lot of coin at the time before public GPU mining software became available. There was no great outrage about this at the time because bitcoin was only worth a few cents still until GPU mining became publicly available. After that GPU mining was generally quite available through simple GPU miners which I consolidated into the general purpose cgminer application to make it available everywhere. FPGA miners came out about year later but were never popular because the initial cost of purchasing the FPGA miner never offset the savings in electricity they had over GPUs. They did not have significantly higher hashrate than the GPUs. When the first ASICs appeared the following year, their hashrate was so much higher than GPUs that it would have been impossible to hide their hashrate. The highest spec GPU at the time was 700MH and the first ASIC was 70GH. We all could see the sudden rise in network hashrate and difficulty followed it. We also knew who got the first ASIC miner itself and we were watching his hashrate...
damn, this sounds awesome., i like where this is going.
how can you tell network hashrate ?
and how can you find who owns much/maximum hashrate ?
CPUs were mining for approximately 2 years before GPU mining started. The first GPU miner was known to keep the mining software to himself and mined a lot of coin at the time before public GPU mining software became available.
GPU mining appeared roughly 1.5 years after the Bitcoin genesis block, in mid 2010. ArtForz was the first to use it (see ArtForz story here
http://www.ofnumbers.com/2014/04/20/how-artforz-changed-the-history-of-bitcoin-mining/) and indeed he did not go public but GPU public mining code appeared very shortly, see, eg.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/python-opencl-bitcoin-miner-1334. In late 2010/ early 2011 GPU mining was already dominating but CPU mining was still possible. First mining pools appeared in late 2010.
CPU mining stopped being profitable (although malware bots continued to mine it longer) roughly in Q2 2011.
26,650 bitcoins at today's rate , make more than 200 mil. fuck me, he is smart.
even though satoshi could have done same, but he wanted everyone to join/participate.
