gmaxwell, a respected and very highly knowledgeable member of the bitcoin community, just made the argument for Satoshi's initial hashing power being in the order of 14kh/s because of the length of time between blocks 0 and 1. As if he created the genesis block
I was actually taking Sergio's dopey argument and substituting in the data we actually had, I never said it was a good argument. I also said _lower bound_, which you deceptively omitted in your repetition there. I also gave a much higher number which was my measurement with contemporary hardware in software, which you've helpfully omitted.
Why does gmaxwell says such an erroneous fact about hashing rate in 2009 ? Maybe he had a Commodore 64 back in 2009.
See
http://www.cryptopp.com/benchmarks.html. At the bottom of the page says it was last edited on 2009.
The CPU is a Intel Core 2 1.83 GHz. The performance is 3.4 MHash/sec (111 MiB/sec)
So who's making FUD ?
Because I actually tested the openssl code in the reference software on a PIII that I had been using at the time and got somewhere around ~47KH/s. I'd offer to run it again but I've since moved across the country and no longer have any old computers. But heck, you won't even try the actual software you keep _miscalculating_ (SHA256 processes 512 bytes at a time, 111 MiB/sec ~= 113KH/s of SHA256^2) based on unrelated software (and even then, it doesn't sound too inconsistent with my figures)! What the heck! Are you allergic to actually using a computer?
I'll ask again since it went ignored:
I'm with you that the OP is off on his assessment... but in what way was a P3 "contemporary" to any period of Bitcoin's history? I have a stock 3.2 GHz P4 purchased from Dell in 2005. Prescott core, so a "later" model P4. It can do > 1000KH/s, and it was already obsolete by the time Bitcoin came around four years later. Hell, the Core 2 Quad Q9550 came out in Q1 of 2008, and it easily gets well over 10 MH/s. I'll grant you that the old client was poorly optimized, etc... But P3's were long obsolete even by 2009 standards, so it's rather misleading to claim those results as "contemporary".
To expound upon that... the last PIII was made in 2003. P4's started shipping in November 2000, and were beginning to be replaced by Pentium D's in 2005, of which the last was shipped in August 2008. The "Core 2" family started shipping in 2006, and the first Core i7 shipped in November 2008. So I ask again... in what way was your 4x obsolete PIII in any way "contemporary" to any period of Bitcoin's history? "I used it" doesn't count. I still use my 8 year old P4 as bitcoind node (which is how I could test its hashrate)... but I don't think anyone would argue it is "contemporary".