What risk was there with mining Bitcoins when difficulty was 1?
The problem with proof-of-work is that in order to make the ledger impeachable, people need to throw real-world value into a hole.
Most notably, that the time and electricity would be wasted if Bitcoin failed.
Right, so in the beginnings we're talking absolutely negligible.People throw CPU cycles at all kinds of activities more computationally intense than early coin miners and they do not consider themselves to be taking a 'risk'.