BitClub.

BitClub was the mining poolMining poolA group of miners who share the work of finding blocks and split the rewards, so each gets paid steadily instead of rarely. of BitClub Network, which sold people shares in what it said were three bitcoin mining pools and paid members for bringing in new investors. The pool’s website also invited any miner to join it. It found its first block, 350,387, on 2 April 2015 and its last, 602,584, on 6 November 2019. In 2017, its busiest year, it found about one Bitcoin block in thirty. Every one of its blocks paid the whole reward in the block’s first transaction to a single BitClub address. That reward is separate from the transactions confirmed inside the block.

In December 2019 US prosecutors in New Jersey charged five men over BitClub Network, which they called a fraudulent scheme that took the equivalent of at least $722 million from investors between April 2014 and December 2019. They said the figures shown to investors as “bitcoin mining earnings” were false. Its programmer, Silviu Catalin Balaci, pleaded guilty in July 2020 to conspiring to commit wire fraud and to sell unregistered securities. He admitted that, at the request of Matthew Brent Goettsche, whom prosecutors called BitClub Network’s creator, he had changed those figures to show more than was really being mined. He also said he had never known BitClub Network to run three separate pools.

Two promoters, Joseph Frank Abel and Jobadiah Sinclair Weeks, pleaded guilty in 2020 to conspiring to sell unregistered securities, and to tax offences. In 2022 an investor, Gordon Brad Beckstead, pleaded guilty to conspiring to launder money for Goettsche. Goettsche was never tried: on 28 July 2026, at the Justice Department’s request, the judge dismissed the charges against him for good. The department said it had decided “not to devote further resources” to them.

The pool found fewer blocks through 2019, and none after 6 November, about a month before the arrests. No announcement of its closure was found.