BitMinter

Bitminter

Industry	Mining pool
Founded	June 26, 2011
Founder(s)	DrHaribo
Website	https://bitminter.com

Bitminter was a bitcoin mining pool. Roughly 1% of the bitcoins in circulation came from Bitminter.

Mining was technically difficult in the early days. A text-based mining client had to be run from the command line. Most people didn't know what a command line was. The original idea for Bitminter was for an easy-to-use graphical mining client that anyone could use. This was for mining on graphics cards initially. As client development neared completion the project turned into a full mining pool instead of just the client.

The coinbase signature for this pool is: "BitMinter" .

Some numbers:

• 728 658 user accounts
• mined for 9 years
• website up for 10 years
• mined 208 232 BTC (new coins + transaction fees)
• mined 6487 blocks that are part of today's Bitcoin blockchain
• mined 1755 blocks before the first halving, creating 87750 new bitcoins (50 per block)
• mined 4671 more blocks before the second halving, creating 116775 new bitcoins (25 per block)
• mined 61 more blocks before the third halving, creating 762.5 new bitcoins (12.5 per block)
• minted 205 287.5 new Bitcoins in total, 0.978% of all the bitcoins that will ever be minted

Timeline:

2021-07-02: Bitminter website was shut down

2021-06-01: Intended website shutdown date - shutdown postponed

2020-07-01: Mining operations halted

2020-06-01: Shutdown announced by direct email to users, Bitcointalk and social media

2020-05-11: Third Bitcoin halving, reducing block reward from 12.5 to 6.25 BTC

2019-09 to 2020-05: Bitminter hashpower dropped very low - attempts to bring in big miners were unsuccessful

2019-08-12: Last Bitcoin block (#589801) mined by Bitminter

2019-08-01: Bitminter reached 700 000 users

2017-07-03: Bitminter reached 500 000 users

2016-07-09: Second Bitcoin halving, reducing block reward from 25 to 12.5 BTC

2014-03-16: Bitminter reached 250 000 users

2014: Small ASIC miners that connect to a PC's USB-port could no longer compete with the big stand-alone ASIC miners. This made the Bitminter (PC) client software obsolete, but Bitminter went on as a mining pool.

2013-08-27: Bitminter reached 100 000 users

2013-05: Peak mining activity; approx. 10% of the world's Bitcoin hashpower was mining with Bitminter, sometimes producing up to 20% of the daily blocks and bitcoins

2013-01: The first ASIC mining machines began shipping to customers. During 2013 support for a few models was added to the Bitminter client software.

2012-11-28: First Bitcoin halving, reducing block reward from 50 to 25 BTC

2012-09-11: Bitminter reached 10 000 users

2012: During 2012 some FPGA mining machines were sold commercially. Support for a few models was added to the Bitminter client software.

2011-11-07: Bitminter began sending all mining income to address 19PkHafEN18mquJ9ChwZt5YEFoCdPP5vYB - 57 blocks were mined with individual addresses prior to this

2011-11-04: Merged mining of namecoin (NMC) started

2011-10-24: Bitminter reached 1000 users

2011-07-20: Bitminter reached 100 users

2011-07-03: First Bitcoin block (#134500) mined by Bitminter

2011-06-26: Bitminter launched; the user-friendly alternative with easy-to-use mining software for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

2011-03: Development of the Bitminter software began.

External Links

• Main webpage
• Bitminter support thread
• Support thread for the Bitminter client (Windows/Linux/Mac)

See Also

• Comparison of mining pools
• Pooled mining