The following email is from Nathaniel Popper’s book, Digital Gold. It was provided by Laszlo Hanecz, the man who spent 10,000 Bitcoins for pizza back in 2010.
It is not widely known, but in April 2010, Laszlo was essentially the first person to experiment with using the GPU card in his computer to more efficiently mine Bitcoins. Before that, most Bitcoin users had been employing their much less efficient CPU to do the computations. When Laszlo first emailed Satoshi and told him about his plans to mine with his GPU, Satoshi had mixed feelings.
It is interesting because it makes clear that Satoshi was against socialism and that he did not care about wealth distribution in Bitcoin all that much, something that is often said to be a problem these days. The dates provided are approximations.
GPUs would prematurely limit the incentive to only those with high end GPU hardware. It’s inevitable that GPU compute clusters will eventually hog all the generated coins, but I don’t want to hasten that day. If the difficulty gets really high, that increases the value of each coin in a way since the supply becomes more limited. The supply is the same: 50 coins every 10 minutes.
But GPUs are much less evenly distributed, so the generated coins only go towards rewarding 20% of the people for joining the network instead of 100%.
I don’t mean to sound like a socialist, I don’t care if wealth is concentrated, but for now, we get more growth by giving that money to 100% of the people than giving it to 20%. Also, the longer we can delay the GPU arms race, the more mature the OpenCL libraries get, and the more people will have OpenCL compatible video cards. If we see from the difficulty factor that someone is using too much GPU, we can certainly pick this OpenCL stuff up again then. Maybe my effort to maintain GPU innocence is running out of time. It’s worked out so far.
Satoshi
I don’t mean to sound like a socialist, I don’t care if wealth is concentrated…
It’s inevitable that GPU compute clusters will eventually hog all the generated coins, but I don’t want to hasten that day. If the difficulty gets really high, that increases the value of each coin in a way since the supply becomes more limited. The supply is the same: 50 coins every 10 minutes.
