Quote from: papajo on October 13, 2013, 09:45:27 PM

But how did it start? I mean back when noone had a bitcoin or a fraction of it.. how did the frist miners mine.. what was the "job" that was assigned to them? since there could not be a blockchain of transactions since no transaction occured at the very beginning of bitcoins...

Ya, the blockchain concept is a little foreign and takes a while to understand.

The "work" performed in mining is to compile a block that contains the coinbase transaction as well as ZERO or more additional transactions, and then perform a hash of the block such that the numeric value of the output of that hash is below some target "difficulty" value.

So there didn't need to be any additional transactions to build a block, other than the coinbase transaction. Even today there are blocks mined occasionally with zero additional transactions in them (other than the coinbase transaction itself), simply because whoever mined it didn't include any. That's perfectly valid, just not economically smart since there were likely fees from other transactions that were passed up.

Here's the first block
- http://blockexplorer.com/block/000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f

Click on Next block .... it goes until block 170 without any transactions:
- http://blockexplorer.com/block/00000000d1145790a8694403d4063f323d499e655c83426834d4ce2f8dd4a2ee