BTPOOL.

BTPOOL found 703 Bitcoin blocks between 15 June 2017 and 22 December 2018, by mempool.space’s count. Little is public about it: no website, company or people have been found for it, and the lists of mining poolsMining poolA group of miners who share the work of finding blocks and split the rewards, so each gets paid steadily instead of rarely. that name it give no link. Its blocks grew rare in the autumn of 2018, it has found none since, and no announcement that it had closed has been found.

Each BTPOOL block paid its whole reward to a single address in the block’s first transaction, moving between about 40 addresses over time. That reward is separate from the transactions confirmed inside the block. Nothing has been published about how, or whether, it paid other miners from there.

From June to November 2017 its blocks carried the letters “NYA”, for the New York Agreement: a plan by more than 50 companies to activate SegWitSegWitSegregated Witness: a 2017 upgrade that moved signatures into a separate part of each payment, making room for more payments., an upgrade to Bitcoin’s rules, and then double the block size, a step known as SegWit2x. The block-size increase was called off on 8 November 2017.