EclipseMC.

EclipseMC, the Eclipse Mining Consortium, opened on 13 June 2011, announced 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 by a user called Inaba. It promised “a zero fee pool” built on its own code, with servers in the US, Europe and Asia, and paid miners in bitcoin or, at first, in US dollars through PayPal. By March 2015 its terms said the site was “owned and operated by BF Labs, Inc.”, a company in Kansas better known as Butterfly Labs, which sold Bitcoin mining machines.

EclipseMC shared each block’s reward among its miners by their recent work, using a method called double geometric scoring, and later also offered pay per share, or PPS: a set amount for each piece of work, whether or not the pool found a block. Either way, each EclipseMC block’s first transaction paid the reward to the pool, and the pool paid its miners separately. These are payments to the pool’s miners, separate from the transactions confirmed inside the block.

mempool.space credits it with blocks from 10 February 2012, when they began to carry its name. It was at its largest that year, finding about one Bitcoin block in twenty, and in some weeks almost one in ten. It shrank from 2014 and found 12 blocks in 2016, the last, 400,824, on 2 March. On 28 March 2016 it told its miners: “EMC is shutting down. Please point your miners to other servers and withdraw any remaining funds in your account.” It gave no reason.