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can someone confirm if this is true or false. When a miner started to mine in 2009, they were automatically given five bitcoins? That is 5 BitCoins automatically appeared in their wallet almost like a signing-on bonus. Not much of a bonus since the value was less than a cent but you know what I mean.

Thank you

RedGrittyBrick
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Joe Bloggs
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2 Answers2

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I believe all the following has applied since the beginning and is still what happens.

The mining reward is not given when starting to mine but is allocated when each block has been successfully mined.

The miner chooses what happens to the mining reward. They include as the first transaction in a block a special "coinbase" transaction that has no inputs and at least one output. The sum of the outputs cannot exceed the sum of the currect mining reward plus the total of transaction fees offerred by each transaction they include in that block.

The mining reward cannot be spent until 100 further blocks have been mined (by any miner) in a chain including the mined block.

The mining reward halves every four years roughly.

Related

RedGrittyBrick
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  • Thank you. I can recall downloading BitCoin in 2009 and mining. Frankly, I cannot remember a great deal other than stopping after a few days (maybe a week) because the coins were worth less than cents and I could not see how I would cover the electrical cost. What I remember though is I started off with some BitCoin before I mined, maybe I am wrong about this. – Joe Bloggs Apr 19 '21 at 17:02
  • I think the asker may have mixed up the story of Gavin Andresen giving away 5 BTC a pop from his faucet with mining. – Murch Apr 19 '21 at 17:24
  • No, I am being serious so no mixup. Remember, this was before all the buzz and hype. I merely stumbled on BitCoin when conducting research in other areas back in 2009. Being an Economics grad' I like the idea and thought it had potential but after mining for a short time, I thought the cost of electricity would make it a bad bet. I am in the process of trying to recover the wallet.dat from multiple HDDs. It is a long shot but worth a try; there was certainly BitCoin in the Wallet but I have no idea how many; why would I pay much attention to it back then? – Joe Bloggs Apr 19 '21 at 17:36
  • In 2009 there were no mining pools.The first mining pool ever was Slush pool and it was started in 2010. All bitcoins were generated from block rewards. So, you might have mined a block in 2009 easily and that would be 50 BTC. Or you might have created a wallet on Coinbase or Blockchain.com, I think the former might have given $10 on sign-up for a while. But all these things were started later, there would have been no way to "sign-up" in 2009, and a block reward would have been 50 not 5 BTC. – Murch Apr 19 '21 at 17:44
  • Since you're talking about a wallet.dat, I think you may have been running the Bitcoin client, though. – Murch Apr 19 '21 at 17:45
  • It wasn't so much signing up but downloading mining software from the internet. When installed it took an age for it to collaborate before it could start the mining process. I did not sign up to Coinbase and the like if they existed at the time. This was in 2009. I am certainly no Crypto-head, I was more of an academic Economic enthusiast with intermediate IT skills. I was certainly mining in 2009, I still have the HDDs from that time but some have been overwritten so I am using software to see if it is possible to recover data. I don't know which HDD was in the mining computer. – Joe Bloggs Apr 19 '21 at 17:51
  • "Since you're talking about a wallet.dat, I think you may have been running the Bitcoin client, though. –"

    Excuse me, I have been researching online about what I should be searching for. Wallet.dat came up, in truth, I have no idea what I should be searching for other than the mining software which could be the BitCoin client.

     – Joe Bloggs Apr 19 '21 at 17:51
  • Anyway, thank you all. I will continue with the HDD file recovery work. – Joe Bloggs Apr 19 '21 at 18:03
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The mining reward used to be 50 btc in 2009, for a successfully mined block. So not really at all like a "signup bonus", you actually had to do the work (and be the fastest to get the correct hash!) to get it.

GandalfThePink
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  • Thank you. I am just trying to recall all the details. There is no point typing successfully in bold; I refer to 2009 when btc was worthless and successful mining was a trivial task. – Joe Bloggs Apr 19 '21 at 17:43