

Ask HN:  How were the first 12 million bitcoins distributed? - sixQuarks

It&#x27;s my understanding that there are 12 million bitcoins out there.  How did one go about obtaining this first &quot;batch&quot;?  And does anyone know how much they were selling for originally?
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gnerd
The first BitCoins were mined as part of the genesis block in January of 2009
but can not be spent due to a quirk in the system.[1]

From then on more BTC were mined (at a rate of 50 for every block solved, now
25 for every block as it halves every 4 years) and the first transaction was
done from Satoshi to Hal Finney at block 170 (just under 2 weeks from the
first block mined).[2]

By October of 2009 the first valuation for the purchase of BTC was published
(New Liberty Standard) and it used a convoluted pricing scheme to value $1 =
1,309.03 BTC.

The first actual market established was BitCoin Market[3] and they were sold
for about $0.008 = 1BTC.

So since January 3rd, 2009, every 10 minutes a block was solved, giving a
reward of 50 newly created BTC and in November of last year the block reward
halved (so now it is 25 BTC for every block solved). It seems for over a year
and a half, if you knew BitCoin existed, you could have mined a lot of them
with nothing more than a CPU. Once the first GPU miners were released, that's
when it became really competitive.

There is a full run down of the history of BitCoin at bitcoin.it[4]

[1]
[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block)

[2]
[https://blockexplorer.com/block/00000000d1145790a8694403d406...](https://blockexplorer.com/block/00000000d1145790a8694403d4063f323d499e655c83426834d4ce2f8dd4a2ee)

[3]
[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_Market](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_Market)

[4] [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/History](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/History)

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gvickers
They were mined

[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining)

