Thanks for the kind words guys.
The pizza thing was a lot more popular than I thought so I made good on as many trades as I could. Other than a little bit of single digit change, I spent everything I mined. As you all know, the difficulty rises to adjust to hashing power, so eventually the mining wasn't worth it for me.
GPU mining BTC in 2010!??
As far as I know I was the first to release a GPU miner. I contributed the hash meter back then too, that's what the screen shot was all about. I used to maintain the Mac OS builds but others have taken that up now. It was a fun project and I learned all about OpenCL. I can't find the thread on the forum anymore but you can find it in my web dir (
http://eclipse.heliacal.net/~solar/bitcoin/sha256.cl ). That was back in May 2010. Maybe there were other people who were doing it in private too, though. For a long time I had been looking for a reason to learn how to write a shader, and this was a great project for it. The way I looked at it, I was helping out with an open source project, and I was making pizza with my code.
You guys will laugh now but I mined everything with an nvidia 9800 GTX+ on Mac OS (hackintosh, another scene I used to help out in). I ended up getting 2 AMD Radeon 5970s with the bitcoins I was mining, but at the time, the OpenCL libraries from AMD and nvidia both were really buggy and I never got it to work right on more than one GPU. The same code that would work on the nvidia on linux wouldn't work on windows and vice versa. I was trying to make a generic OpenCL miner that everyone could run on all 3 platforms, and I spent months tweaking different kernels for each GPU, but I was also working two jobs at the time and so I never finished it. I ended up just leaving bitcoin on the back burner for a few years, then it exploded and people started asking me about the pizza trades. Every time the value goes up on exchanges, people email me asking me to comment on it, but really there isn't much more to tell than what I explained here.
This is the old GPU mining release I made for Mac OS, probably won't work anymore though:
http://eclipse.heliacal.net/~solar/bitcoin/Bitcoin-MacOSX-Intel-svn-75-opencl-2010-05-10.dmgWow!
I didn't know much more from you than the infamous pizza story. It all happened way before my time.
Well, in case you don't want to be seen as kind of a tragic bitcoin hero:
you already have more credibility than, lets say, MtGox and many of the other big bitcoin businesses. I don't know what your personal interests are these days, but whatever you do - a professional exchange, a meta-protocol, hardware, a foundation - you can be sure of a *lot* of attention.
With what I already knew of you, and the little I read now, I already stand behind you fully. In case you ever need a bunch of geeks standing behind you :-)
(I hope you don't understand this wrong. Financial success isn't the most important thing. But you sure deserve it)
Ente
