It's my understanding that there are 12 million bitcoins out there. How did one go about obtaining this first "batch"? And does anyone know how much they were selling for originally?
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]
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
[2] https://blockexplorer.com/block/00000000d1145790a8694403d406...
[3] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_Market
[4] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/History