Crypto mining remains one of the most lucrative sectors of the crypto industry. Yet, its profitability today is nothing compared to what it was during the early days of Bitcoin.
As a case in point, an early Bitcoin miner, who mined BTC tokens during the Satoshi days, recently made a fortune selling 100 BTCs. Benjamin Brannan, the head of business development at CryptoQuant, reveals that these tokens were 13 years old and had a combined value of just $1.
This early Bitcoin adopter moved 100 of his BTC tokens on Nov. 7, a day on which the price of a single Bitcoin was around $35,000. Brennan reveals that 50 of the moved tokens were sold, while the remaining 50 were also sent to an exchange or an over-the-counter (OTC) trading platform.
Assuming that all the tokens were eventually sold, this miner made profits upwards of $3.5 million. He could also have a substantial amount of mined Bitcoin left in his holdings, which he could sell later at significantly higher prices.
The Evolution of Crypto Mining
With the crypto market displaying extreme bullish tendencies over the past month, the profitability of the Bitcoin mining industry is once again in the headlines. On Tuesday, the daily Bitcoin mining revenue hit $44 million, creating a new all-time high. This led Changpeng “CZ” Zhou, the founder of the Binance crypto exchange, to call Bitcoin the greatest business model ever invented.
Predictably, Google Trends data reveals that “Crypto Mining”, “What is a crypto mine” and “What is crypto mining” searches are surging in number.
In the early days, Bitcoin mining was a relatively simple process, easily accomplishable on a general purpose CPU. Many of the early Bitcoin adopters – which mostly consisted of computer scientists and university students – mined their own BTCs.
Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, is said to have mined over 1.12 million tokens – a substantial amount which would be worth over $40 billion at today’s price.
The CPUs were soon replaced by graphics process units or GPUs. In fact, Laszlo Hanyecz, t
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Author: BeInCrypto Team