quoting note1rf9…2c42When it comes to bitcoin, I think I know what I am talking about because.....
I come from from a long line of bitcoin miners. My ancestors were all bitcoin miners. My father, grandfather, and great grandfather were all bitcoin miners. It was dangerous work. Deaths in the mines were all too common. My grandfather died in a bitcoin mining accident in 1961.
I remember that, as a child in the 1960's, everybody in the community relied on the mining income. It's the only work there was back then.
We were pretty poor. Bitcoin wasn't worth much, not like today. On the other hand they were much more plentiful and easier to find. When I was a child, a block of 50 bitcoins wasn't hard to find. Those bitcoins could feed an entire family for a week. Sometimes my dad would find two blocks in a week. When that happened we would get to eat meat on a Sunday. But there were also the weeks when he didn't find any, and we would go hungry.
I remember him once coming home pretty happy. He had found a hard fork. He gave us all a big kiss and then handed my mum a big bundle of bitcoin cash. She took us all out for a treat in the movies.
It wasn't a steady income. You never knew if you were going to find any bitcoin. To smooth out the ups and downs my dad eventually joined a mining pool which shared the results amongst its members. It didn't last long. The difficulty was constantly going up and the rewards became less and less.
As I said, it was hard and gruelling work. They didn't use nice clean electricity like they do today. It was hard and dirty work involving sweat and blood.
If you want to know the real meaning of "proof of work", just imagine my father when he came home after a gruelling day down a bitcoin mine. You knew where he had been. The proof was everywhere. His skin and clothes were covered in bitcoin dust. The whole house used to stink of it. I think it was what killed him He was probably constantly inhaling bitcoin dust into his blockchain.
If my father was still alive today, I wonder what he would say, on learning that bitcoin is now worth thousands of dollars.
#bitcoin #mining #oldtimer