It’s a Decade Since the First Bitcoin Was Mined, A Short Glimpse Into the Journey of Bitcoin Mining
Today, January 3, marks the completion of a decade since the first Bitcoin block#0 was mined. Exactly, 10 years back on January 3, 2009, was mined on the Bitcoin blockchain network which yielded a mining reward of 50 BTC. Just six days exactly after that i.e. January 9, 2009, the second block (block#1) was mined.
Over the years, as people gained maturity and understanding of BTC’s functioning, the BTC mining community got bigger and bigger. Not only individuals but also big institutions joined the mining community looking into the token rewards offered along with the growing BTC prices.
At the press time, a total of 556853 blocks have been mined on the Bitcoin’s main blockchain network. However, the Bitcoin mining industry has been through a shaky ride all these years over the last decade.
The Bitcoin’s proof-of-work algorithm is designed in a way wherein the computational complexity keeps on increasing with each block mined and added to the Bitcoin network. As more and more miners joined the BTC mining camps, the complexity escalated further. Moreover, this further resulted into miners using more sophisticated and high-end hardware chips which could complement the computational demand. But this hardware chips are known to suck a lot of electricity power.
As a result, the cost of BTC mining has increased over the year. Moreover, there also significant reduction in the mining rewards. In 2019, the BTC mining activity gained a lot of attention as the price of Bitcoin sky rocketed to its all-time high of $20,000. However, last year’s poor performance by Bitcoin has severely hurt the mining business worldwide leading to many organizations even closing their operations.
The continuously falling price of Bitcoin has, in fact, resulted in a huge surge in the cost of mining over that of the rewards received. The mining activity which was at its peak during December 2017 has slowed down over the last year.
Mining BTC tokens, however, stands to be the most lucrative option for many miner considering its value and that Bitcoin alone dominates more than 50% of the overall cryptocurrency market. Furthermore, the Bitcoin ecosystem also comprises of several derivative products built around it drawing the attention of big financial players from the industry.
It is highly unlikely that BTC mining will go out of consideration from the crypto space as long as BTC continues to dominate the crypto industry.