BTC.TOP.

BTC.TOP was a Chinese 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. founded by Jiang Zhuoer, who had led a data team at China Mobile in Shanghai before he turned to Bitcoin mining. It found its first block, 442,947, on 11 December 2016. At first it was a private pool that miners could join only by invitation, and by February 2017 it had about 8% of Bitcoin’s mining power, CCN reported. mempool.space credits it with 16,732 blocks in all, about 1.7% of all Bitcoin blocks.

Jiang wanted Bitcoin’s block size limit raised. The limit caps how many transactions fit in a block. “The market needs big blocks,” he told CCN in 2017, when the pool mined with Bitcoin Unlimited, software meant to let miners raise the limit themselves. BTC.TOP also mined Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin and Dogecoin.

By 2020 it paid its miners by full pay per share, or FPPS: a set amount for each piece of work they sent, covering the new bitcoin and the usual transaction fees, whether or not the pool found a block. It worked out each day’s earnings the next morning, Beijing time, and paid them in bitcoin or, if a miner chose, in Chinese yuan to a bank card. So each BTC.TOP block’s first transaction paid the reward to the pool, which paid its miners separately. These are payments to the pool’s miners, separate from the transactions confirmed inside the block.

In May 2021, days after China’s State Council called for a crackdown on Bitcoin mining, Jiang said on Weibo that BTC.TOP was suspending its business in China because of the regulatory risk and would mine mainly in North America. Its blocks grew rare from late June, and its last, 690,257, was found on 9 July 2021. It has found none since, and no later announcement about the pool was found.