BWPool.

BWPool 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 BW, short for Bitcoin Website, a bitcoin mining company in Shenzhen, China. It was set up in August 2014 by a maker of mining machines and CHBTC, one of China’s biggest bitcoin exchanges, and also made and sold mining machines and rented out mining power. In 2015 its chief executive was Wenjie Zhai, and its miners used cheap hydroelectric power in remote parts of China.

mempool.space’s count for the pool begins with block 340,990 on 29 January 2015, and within weeks it was finding about one block in ten. In October 2015 Bitcoin Magazine called it the world’s fifth-largest pool. In June 2015 BW was one of five large Chinese pools that called for Bitcoin’s block size limit, which caps how many transactions fit in a block, to be raised to 8 MB, instead of the 20 MB then proposed, and for almost two years its blocks carried the words “BW Support 8M”. mempool.space credits it with 12,733 blocks in all, about 1.3% of all Bitcoin blocks.

From the start miners chose how to be paid: by pay per share, or PPS, a set amount for each piece of work they sent, whether or not the pool found a block; or by PPLNS, which shares out each block the pool finds by its miners’ recent work. By 2018 it also offered solo mining and mined Litecoin, Ethereum and other coins as well as Bitcoin. Each BWPool block paid the whole reward, in its first transaction, to one BW address, and the pool paid its miners separately. These are payments to the pool’s miners, separate from the transactions confirmed inside the block.

In 2017, BW later said, an Australian company, Collinstar Holding, bought BW.com, which became a cryptocurrency exchange, and in July 2018 the pool moved to its own website, bwpool.net. Its last block, 549,337, was found on 9 November 2018, and it has found none since. Its website still offered Bitcoin mining in March 2020, and no announcement that it had stopped was found. A block found by BWPool doesn’t mean the transactions inside it went through the BW.com exchange.