Bitcoin Affiliate Network.

Bitcoin Affiliate Network, or BitAffNet, opened its 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. in July 2014. It named no company. Its operator, who posted on the BitcointalkBitcointalkThe Bitcoin forum Satoshi Nakamoto opened in November 2009. Much of Bitcoin’s early history, from the pizza offer to Satoshi’s last post, happened there. forum as s0br, said the pool was meant as a free service for a new company the team would launch that autumn. Its first block, 312,570, came on 26 July 2014.

It began with PPLNS, a share of each block’s reward by how much of the recent work a miner had done, and by September 2014 paid by pay per share, or PPS: a set amount for each piece of work, whether or not the pool found a block, paid out as often as every hour. To win miners it added a bonus on top, and in August 2014 gave away a mining machine every day. On 25 December 2014 it suspended the bonus, saying it had “suffered some losses” and that some people had abused it. Each block’s first transaction paid the whole reward to a pool address, and the pool paid its miners from there. These are payments to the pool’s miners, separate from the transactions confirmed inside the block.

mempool.space credits it with 438 blocks, about 0.05% of all Bitcoin blocks; its busiest month, March 2015, brought 56, about 1.2% of all blocks. From July 2015 it found only a few a month, and from September they signalled support for BIP 101, a proposal to raise the 1 MB limit on the size of blocks. On 31 October 2015 its home page read only “Currently being restored...”. It found its last block, 386,314, on 2 December 2015, and by March 2016 its site said it wasn’t accepting new members. No announcement of a closure was found.