Bitcoin in 2011: I mined on my mother's laptop and sold them for 270 euros

This is the page of a mining pool. The username is mine, baldarn. And it says that in total I mined 0.005 bitcoin.

When I mined them, in 2011, they were worth a few cents. A few years ago I sold them for 270 euros. No, I didn’t get rich, but I did take something home.

To understand how I got there, let’s take a step back. A long way back.

Digital money before bitcoin

The idea of digital money is much older than bitcoin. In the early ’80s a cryptographer, David Chaum, invented anonymous electronic cash, and in 1990 he founded DigiCash. It worked, but there was always a company at the centre. In 1998 DigiCash went bankrupt.

Meanwhile, on the cypherpunk mailing list, people convinced that cryptography was a tool for freedom, other ideas were going around. Hashcash by Adam Back: using computing work as proof of work. B-money by Wei Dai. Bit Gold by Nick Szabo. Pieces of the puzzle. Someone was missing to put them together.

Satoshi Nakamoto’s paper

31 October 2008. A 9-page paper signed Satoshi Nakamoto lands on a cryptography mailing list: “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”.

The problem it solves is simple to state: how do I stop a digital coin from being spent twice, without a bank checking?

The answer is the blockchain. A public ledger, copied across thousands of computers, where new blocks can only be added by doing computing work. That work is mining, and whoever does it gets paid in bitcoin.

The first block and Satoshi’s disappearance

3 January 2009, the first block is born. Inside it is that day’s headline from The Times, about a second bailout for British banks. We’re in the middle of the financial crisis, and that’s no accident.

The first person to receive bitcoin from Satoshi is Hal Finney, a cypherpunk. Then, between 2010 and 2011, Satoshi stops writing and disappears. We still don’t know who he is.

The 10,000 bitcoin pizzas and the first pool

22 May 2010: a programmer, Laszlo Hanyecz, buys two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoin. Today that would be more than 700 million dollars.

27 November 2010: in the Czech Republic the first mining pool is born, lots of computers mining together and splitting the reward. It lives at mining.bitcoin.cz, but everyone calls it Slush’s pool, after the nickname of its founder Marek Palatinus. Remember this address.

The 2011 boom

In spring 2011 bitcoin goes from one dollar to over 30 in a few months. An article covers Silk Road, an online market where you pay in bitcoin. Everyone’s talking about it.

And that’s where I come in.

Me and my mother’s laptop

3 June 2011. I write to the mailing list of LILiK, the engineering students’ collective in Florence. Subject: “Bitcoin: what the fuck is this stuff?”. I wanted to understand how it worked and what you could actually buy with it.

Three days later I sign up on mining.bitcoin.cz. Yes, that same pool.

My mining rig? My mother’s Toshiba laptop. Computing power: practically zero. While others were starting to stack graphics cards, I was mining with that. Final result: 0.005 bitcoin, a few cents at the prices of the time.

Mt. Gox and the roller coaster

It’s 19 June, two weeks after my email: Mt. Gox, the biggest exchange in the world, gets hacked. The price crashes. Welcome to crypto.

From then on it’s a roller coaster:

• end of 2013, bitcoin passes 1,000 dollars;
• February 2014, Mt. Gox goes bankrupt and hundreds of thousands of bitcoin vanish. Around that time I stop using the pool;
• 2015, Ethereum arrives: the blockchain no longer runs just money, it runs programs;
• 2017, the ICO bubble: everyone launches their own coin and bitcoin gets close to 20,000 dollars;
• 2018, the crash. And I start getting flyers for blockchain meetups and Quora questions like “how do you mine bitcoin for free?”. A sign it had gone mainstream;
• then NFTs, El Salvador making it legal tender in 2021, the collapse of FTX in 2022 and, in 2024, bitcoin ETFs on Wall Street.

The currency born against the banks is now sold by the banks.

Finding my account again

A few years ago I remembered that pool. I had mined them for a few cents, surely they were worth more now. I went to check.

In the meantime the site had become Slush Pool, and since 2022 it’s called Braiins Pool. But my 2011 account was still there: 0.005 bitcoin, about 270 euros. I didn’t expect it. I took them and I was happy.

Sorry I sold them? No. Around me, in 2011, nobody wanted to jump into this adventure. At least I got something.

Blockchain instead of notaries

And what do I think today? That the most interesting part isn’t the coins, it’s the technology underneath.

A blockchain is a public ledger that nobody can secretly change. It’s perfect for certifying things: that a document exists, who signed it and when, who owns a house. In Italy, for all of this, we have notaries.

So if you ask me what I’d want from the blockchain: a replacement for notaries.

Would you have believed in it back in 2011? Tell me in the comments on the video (it’s in Italian).