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Comment by SamPatt | Hacker News Reader

I'm extremely skeptical of this claim.

Only a handful of people were mining Bitcoin in 2009, which is the same year it was created.

Yeah, only computer tech geeks were using it then. The kind of people who would do wild stuff like go to college and install Linux on PlayStations.

I don't know if Linux users had (have?) much sympathy for bitcoin.

I think Linux users are humans with a range of interests.

I'd say 2009-2012 it was mostly Linux users, at least the communities I was in.

I know a gui for bitcoin core was available for windows machines by at least the end of 2010 as that's what I used when I was first reading about it.

The original bitcoin software ran on Windows if I'm not mistaken, so I don't know about "mostly Linux users".

Maybe it was different in the US. In Europe I get the impression the FOSS community is predominantly left-leaning. My local Debian community certainly is, and they're anti-cryptocurrency (like myself).

Slashdot was also quite skewed against bitcoin, and that was a pretty international geek readership.

It was mostly hackerspace/linux kind of people back then.

The 2009 academic year runs from Fall 2009 through Spring 2010, so it may be a bit later than you're thinking?

The first Bitcoin difficulty adjustment happened on Dec 30 2009. Which means that for entirety of year 2009 there was on average just one computer mining Bitcoins.

Not really a stretch. I have a similar story that I can attribute to 2009/2010 (attempting to mine on the person's computer I was living with at the time)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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