Most surprising thing in bitcoin history for me was the profitability of mining bitcoin.
The mining the fictional characters did in the
The Big Bang Theory episode, was done on a regular laptop computer (using a laptop to mine can actually be harmful to the internal components), and used a negligible amount of electricity, potentially the same amount as would otherwise have been consumed (some
seti contributors temporarily stopped giving their resources to the SETI at home program and used their computer's resources to mine). The value of the mined coins, at the time they were mined were likely not even enough to to pay for the characters' time to setup the mining program.
In Bitcoin's early days, mining was profitable because technology to create more efficient ASIC chips quickly advanced, and the slow rate of filling orders for ASICs. In many cases, an ASIC manufacturer would have designed a new ASIC miner, offer it for sale at a price at which the buyer would earn the entire purchase price back within a week, but by the time it is delivered, difficulty went up by so much that profitability would take months after factoring in the purchase price.
The price of BTC was going up so quickly in its early days that it was often more profitable to purchase BTC than it was to purchase a miner because the miner would not generate as much BTC as you could have purchased when you paid for the miner.