It is currently 2 trillion times harder to mine a bitcoin block than when I solo mined my first block on my MacBook Pro. With block reward halvings, that’s 32 trillion times more hashes per bitcoin than back in my day.

Back then, I naively thought that if people started mining bitcoin while excluding a subset of transactions, then I’d just start mining again and even if it took me all month and doubled my electricity bill, I’d push those transactions through myself. What a fool I was.