BitMinter.

BitMinter was a Bitcoin 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. run by Aesir Financial AS, a Norwegian company wholly owned by Geir Harald Hansen, known on the Bitcoin forum as DrHaribo. In March 2011 Hansen began writing a mining program with windows and buttons, because mining then meant typing commands that most people didn’t know how to use. The project grew into a full pool, which opened on 26 June 2011 and found its first block, 134,500, on 3 July.

Its busiest month was May 2013. About a tenth of all Bitcoin mining power was then mining with BitMinter, by its own count, and on some days it found a fifth of all blocks. It paid by PPLNS (pay per last N shares): when it found a block, it shared the reward among its miners by the work each had done recently. From 7 November 2011 every BitMinter block’s first transaction paid the whole reward to one pool address, and the pool paid its miners from there. These were payments to the pool’s miners, separate from the transactions confirmed inside the block.

From 2014 small mining sticks that plugged into a computer could no longer compete with large mining machines. That made BitMinter’s program obsolete, but the pool carried on. It found its last block, 589,801, on 12 August 2019. On 1 June 2020 Hansen announced that it would close. The pool had “shrunk so much that we might never find another block”, he wrote, and attempts to bring in big miners had failed. Mining stopped on 1 July 2020. By BitMinter’s final count it had 728,658 user accounts and found 6,487 blocks, which created 205,287.5 new bitcoin, just under 1% of all there will ever be. mempool.space, which credits its blocks only from November 2011, counts 6,464.