MegaBigPower.

MegaBigPower was a bitcoin mining company founded by Dave Carlson, a software engineer, and based in Wenatchee, Washington, where hydroelectric power from the Columbia River is cheap. It wasn’t a pool that other miners joined but, in its own words, a “single-operator” mine. In 2014 it ran thousands of mining machines built around BitFury’s chips in two converted warehouses there, which the public radio station KPLU called the largest bitcoin mine in North America, and at a site in Poland. Most of its mining was done for its main investor, Poland’s BioInfoBank Institute; it also rented out computing power and sold mining boards. Ars Technica put its share of the world’s mining power at about 5.6% in March 2014.

mempool.space credits it with 816 blocks, from block 261,530 on 3 October 2013 to block 363,545 on 2 July 2015: blocks marked “megabigpower.com”, and blocks paid to an address that mempool.space’s list gives as MegaBigPower’s. That is far fewer than its reported size would find; mempool.space counts only blocks with its name or a known address. Each block’s first transaction paid the whole reward to one MegaBigPower address. That reward is separate from the transactions confirmed inside the block.

No block has carried its name since 2 July 2015, and MegaBigPower announced no closure. Later that year its website offered to buy used mining machines from miners hit by “poor economics”. In 2016 it sold mining contracts, hosted other people’s machines and mined other coins, such as Zcash. By March 2017 its website said “Mega Has Gone Giga!” and linked to Giga Watt, a company in Washington state that hosted mining machines, with Carlson as its chief executive.