BitMinter
| Industry | Mining pool |
| Founded | June 2011 |
| Defunct | July 2021 (site) / July 2020 (mining) |
| Founder(s) | DrHaribo |
| Website | https://bitminter.com |
BitMinter (styled Bitminter) was a bitcoin mining pool and easy-to-use mining client. The operator later stated that roughly 1% of all bitcoins in circulation had been minted through the pool. The coinbase signature was "BitMinter".
History
Development of the BitMinter client began in March 2011. The pool launched in June 2011 as a graphical alternative to command-line GPU mining on Windows, Linux, and macOS.[1] The first BitMinter block was mined in early July 2011. Namecoin merged mining began in November 2011.
At peak activity around May 2013 the pool sometimes accounted for a large share of daily blocks. As USB ASICs lost competitiveness, the desktop client became obsolete, but the pool continued. Hashrate later fell sharply. The last BitMinter bitcoin block cited by the operator was in August 2019.
Shutdown was announced around the start of June 2020 by email, BitcoinTalk, and social media. Mining operations halted on 1 July 2020. The website was intended to close on 1 June 2021 and was shut down on 2 July 2021.[1][2]
Scale (operator tally)
The shutdown notice listed about 728658 accounts, nine years of mining, 6487 blocks remaining in the chain, and about 205287.5 newly minted bitcoins (under 1% of the eventual 21 million cap), plus fees in the overall BTC mined total.