[SamPatt]

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.

[lupire]

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.

[lottin]

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

[idiotsecant]

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

[squeaky-clean]

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

[lottin]

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.

[greycol]

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.

[kolinko]

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

[jefftk]

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

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

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.

[cj]

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)

[AmericanChopper]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯