A look at the first phone-to-phone Bitcoin transfer using a Nokia N900 smartphone – Bitcoin News

When Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin, the full node client came with a wallet often referred to as Bitcoin-Qt. Nakamoto’s simplified payment verification (SPV) concept was not available until two years later, after former Bitcoin Core developer Mike Hearn published BitcoinJ in 2011. But before the first SPV client or optimized lightweight bitcoin wallet, the first phone-to- The phone bitcoin transaction happened more than 11 years ago on December 7, 2010.

Sending 0.42 Bitcoin from a Nokia N900 to another Nokia N900 in 2010

Satoshi’s Bitcoin is approaching its 14th anniversary, which will take place on January 3, 2023, and to date, the Bitcoin network has been functional 99.98777985271% of the time since its inception on January 3, 2009. During the early years of Bitcoins life, the ecosystem had very little infrastructure compared to today’s abundance of crypto exchanges and bitcoin wallets. The protocol’s second Bitcoin client in the network’s history, Bitcoind was published on January 9, 2009, and before the announcement of BitcoinJ, everyone had to utilize a full node client, also known as Bitcoin-Qt.

However, before Mike Hearn announced BitcoinJ on March 7, 2011, and before the SPV wallet model became super popular and leveraged on mobile phones, the first recorded phone-to-phone bitcoin transaction took place on December 7, 2010. At the time, bitcointalk.org member called “Doublec,” published a post noting that he was able to get Bitcoind to run on an N900 cell phone made by Nokia. Doublec published his post at 5:47 AM (ET) and by 1:30 PM, bitcointalk.org member Ribuck explained that he got Bitcoind running on his Nokia N900.

“This is so cool,” Ribuck replied. “I’ve installed it on my N900 and am up to block 2000. I wonder what the khash/s will be – my guess is 50 khash/s. Let me know your bitcoin receiving address and we can do the first p2p (phone-to-phone) transaction.

Doublec responded and shared his bitcoin address with Ribuck and the rest of the forum. “I created [18T1j] on my phone,” Doublec said, sharing his BTC address. “I’m interested in how the battery hit is for running it full time. Took a *long* time to get it [blockchain]. I get between 130 and 150 khash/s when I did a short generation test run.” Ribuck sent 0.42 BTC the next day on December 8, 2010.

“I sent 0.42 BTC from my N900 at 10:55 GMT. If you receive it, it’s the first ph2ph bitcoin transfer,” said Ribuck. And like Doublec, the bitcointalk.org member said he was mining the BTC blockchain with his Nokia N900 phone. But the amount of dedicated hashrate Ribucks and Doublec’s Nokia produced was not enough hashpower to generate a block reward.

“Just like Doublec’s phone, mine hashes at between 130 and 150 khash/s,” said Ribuck. “‘The estimated ‘average time to generate a block’ is 2,869 days with a current difficulty of 8,078. That’s almost [eight] years, so I’m not holding my breath.”

Bitcointalk.org member Ribuck added:

But if we had 2,869 people generating on phones, someone would generate a block on their phone every day, so it’s possible that a block will be generated on someone’s phone one day.

Bitcoiner highlights how the N900’s operating system utilized Linux and a C++ programming language

A BTC block would never be generated by a mobile phone after Ribucks and Doublec’s conversation, as the network’s difficulty grew exponentially in the early days. GPU (graphics processing unit) farms began to appear at the time, when the pseudonymous miner known as Artforz claimed to have mined 26,650 Bitcoins in nine weeks on September 23, 2010.

Not too long after that, Marek Palatinus (Slush pool, now known as Braiins Pool) created the first bitcoin mining pool on November 27, 2010. Soon the first consumer ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) mining rig was made available by Avalon in early 2013. After a couple of years with GPUs and ASICs combined, GPU mining was no longer relevant after the influx of reliable consumer BTC ASIC miners were made available to the general public.

Despite no one being able to mine BTC with a mobile phone, Ribucks and Doublec’s phone-to-phone transaction was still the first recorded in history via two N900 smartphones. Ribuck noted that installing the Bitcoin client on the N900 was easy because it hosted a Linux operating system with root access. Furthermore, N900 programming was generally done with C++ which is also compatible with the Bitcoin codebase.

What do you think of the first phone-to-phone transaction recorded on a Nokia N900 smartphone? Let us know your thoughts on this topic in the comments section below.

Jamie Redman

Jamie Redman is the news editor at Bitcoin.com News and a financial technology journalist living in Florida. Redman has been an active member of the cryptocurrency community since 2011. He has a passion for Bitcoin, open source and decentralized applications. Since September 2015, Redman has written more than 6,000 articles for Bitcoin.com News about the disruptive protocols emerging today.