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When was the term "mining" (the process of hashing, processing the transactions, adding blocks to the blockchain etc.) first used?
Was it there right from the beginning of bitcoin?
Who was the first to call it mining?
Are the other examples pre-bitcoin of the word "mining" being used in a similar manner (i.e. to mean some sort of computational/cryptographic work)?
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From Satoshi's paper (my emphasis):
By convention, the first transaction in a block is a special transaction that starts a new coin owned by the creator of the block. This adds an incentive for nodes to support the network, and provides a way to initially distribute coins into circulation, since there is no central authority to issue them. The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation. In our case, it is CPU time and electricity that is expended.
I don't know of any other examples where the word has been used in a similar manner.
Did the community always call it mining then even from the beginning? Or were a variety of terms used which gradually ended up with mining being the dominant one? – kirian – 2011-10-29T12:13:36.303
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To answer my own comment above I went looking through the old threads on the bitcointalk.org forum from back in 2010 and found people referring to what is now commonly known as mining as hashing/minting/generating (e.g. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=721.0 or https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1831.0). Haven't found an early reference to mining yet (apart from the quote in Satoshi's paper as mentioned by D.H. above)
– kirian – 2011-10-29T23:29:03.2532Here's a reference to "mining" from June 2010 ("bitcoin mining servers"). Haven't found anything earlier than that though. – D.H. - bitcoin.se – 2011-10-30T09:27:25.997