Bitcoin Mining History

[BlackBoss_]

I'm going to remake this timeline graphic

Many Bitcoin Mining Pools turned to scam at the ends. If they have announcement threads in Bitcointalk, they have active red flags and became defunct.

A step-by-step evolution of Bitcoin mining

At beginning, difficulty is low and miners could mine bitcoins with CPUs. Later, they moved to GPUs and FPGA Mining. A last and current era is ASICs mining.
When more efficient equipment were used for mining, difficulty on Bitcoin network increases sharply.

Operational Pools
The following mining pools are still running and paying out their users:


Defunct Pools
The following pools were once operational but have since shut down. They are listed for historical purposes only.


Reward types
They have many reward types (from Wiki)

• CPPSRB - Capped Pay Per Share with Recent Backpay.
• DGM - Double Geometric Method. A hybrid between PPLNS and Geometric reward types that enables to operator to absorb some of the variance risk. Operator receives portion of payout on short rounds and returns it on longer rounds to normalize payments.
• ESMPPS - Equalized Shared Maximum Pay Per Share. Like SMPPS, but equalizes payments fairly among all those who are owed.
• POT - Pay On Target. A high variance PPS variant that pays on the difficulty of work returned to pool rather than the difficulty of work served by pool
• PPLNS - Pay Per Last N Shares. Similar to proportional, but instead of looking at the number of shares in the round, instead looks at the last N shares, regardless of round boundaries.
• PPLNSG - Pay Per Last N Groups (or shifts). Similar to PPLNS, but shares are grouped into "shifts" which are paid as a whole.
• PPS - Pay Per Share. Each submitted share is worth certain amount of BTC. Since finding a block requires <current difficulty> shares on average, a PPS method with 0% fee would be 6.25 BTC divided by <current difficulty>. It is risky for pool operators, hence the fee is highest.
• Prop. - Proportional. When block is found, the reward is distributed among all workers proportionally to how much shares each of them has found.
• RSMPPS - Recent Shared Maximum Pay Per Share. Like SMPPS, but system aims to prioritize the most recent miners first. [5]
• Score - Score based system: a proportional reward, but weighed by time submitted. Each submitted share is worth more in the function of time t since start of current round. For each share score is updated by: score += exp(t/C). This makes later shares worth much more than earlier shares, thus the miner's score quickly diminishes when they stop mining on the pool. Rewards are calculated proportionally to scores (and not to shares). (at slush's pool C=300 seconds, and every hour scores are normalized)
• SMPPS - Shared Maximum Pay Per Share. Like Pay Per Share, but never pays more than the pool earns.
• FPPS - Full Pay Per Share. Similar to PPS，but not only divide regular block reward (6.25 BTC for now) but also some of the transaction fees. Calculate a standard transaction fee within a certain period and distribute it to miners according to their hash power contributions in the pool. It will increase the miners' earnings by sharing some of the transaction fees.

Researches on Bitcoin Mining Pools
I found three researches about Bitcoin Mining Pools.

Credit to The evolution of mining pools and miners’ behaviors inthe Bitcoin blockchain








Credit to Neighborhood Pool Watch, November 6th 2016 Block Maker Statistics







Credit to Visual Analytics of Bitcoin Mining Pool Evolution: On the Road Toward Stability?




Resources

• Bitcoin Mining Pool List
• Mining Pool (Wiki)
• Pooled mining (Wiki)
• Comparisons of mining pools (Wiki)
• Bitcoin mining pools historical timeline
• The rise of ASICs - a step by step history of Bitcoin mining
• Visual Analytics of Bitcoin Mining Pool Evolution: On the Road Toward Stability?
• The evolution of mining pools and miners’ behaviors inthe Bitcoin blockchain
• A Short History of the World’s Largest Bitcoin Mining Pools
• Slush Pool. The world's first and oldest Bitcoin mining pool has mined nearly 1.3 million BTC since inception. Reading other sources, Slush Pool is not the oldest bitcoin mining pool, it's not correct.
• Neighbourhood Pool Watch Bitcoin mining pool, network, and exchange analysis.. That site has some reports for Weekly pool statistics in 2016. So helpful! like this one November 6th 2016 Block Maker Statistics

Mining pool announcement threads
2011

• BTC Guild - Pay-per-Share Pool
• Eligius: 0% Fee BTC, 105% PPS NMC, No registration, CPPSRB
• Youbtc.net
• Bitminter bitcoin mining pool - shutdown mining 2020-07-01 website 2021-06-01
• Bitminter mining pool shutting down
• [20 gh] NMCBit pool 3% fee prop 6.6% PPS
• [OFFLINE] SIMPLECOIN.US [PPLNS/SMPPS]
• [0Th]Ozcoin Pooled Mining |DGM 1%|Stratum+VarDiff port 80|NEW CN mining|

2012

• [4+ EH] Slush Pool (slushpool.com); Overt AsicBoost; World First Mining Pool
• [CLOSED] MaxBTC.com Pool - Closed Indefinitely Aug 3rd 2013
• [1200 TH] EMC: 0 Fee DGM. Anonymous PPS. US & EU servers. No Registration!
• [ANN] CoinLab Protected Pool
• [NR 1] Triplemining.com <> BIG jackpot every week <>

2013

• [CLOSING] GHash.IO mining pool official page
• [UNRESPONSIVE POOL OPERATOR] 50BTC.com
• ASICMINER: Entering the Future of ASIC Mining by Inventing It

2014

• F2Pool「魚池」🐟. I am not so sure why the thread is in Altcoin board.
• **US** BitFury Setup Guide
• [GUIDE] BitFury Miner Support/Tuning. To mine bitcoins in 2013, it was easy and did not require expensive mining equipments.
• [KnCMiner Guide] Connect to DirectPool, The Community-Driven Pool is Giving Back
• BITMAIN announces Antpool
• BTCMiners "Cloud Hashing" | $8.50 USD per GH/s!

2015

• BTCC pool (not found)
• BW.com (not found)

2016
...

[n0nce]

P2Pool is actually still running since 2011, so you may want to add that!
From what I can tell, all original links are offline, but the latest version is found here: https://github.com/jtoomim/p2pool/ and people still use it. I'm not sure how to tell their current hashrate, though.

[BlackBoss_]

Different Bitcoin Mining Pool Payment Methods (PPS vs FPPS vs PPLNS vs PPS+)
How mining pools distribute rewards? PPS vs FPPS vs PPLNS

Any one knows where to get hashrate distribution by payment systems like the table that is outdated and from 2018. In the first article, in 2018 hashrate distribution is: FPPS (51.7%), PPLNS (4.5%), PPS+ (43.7%), PPS (0%).

Bitcoinexplorer.org's Mining summary has good plot and table for revenue, % revenue of mining pools but it does not have information about those pools' payment methods.

[BlackBoss_]

I'd like to introduce the Hashrate distribution over time from Blockchain.com.

It has a chart for an estimation of hashrate distribution over time amongst the largest mining pools and a table for summary of mined blocks over several time frames from 7D, 1M, 3M, 6M, 1Y, 2Y, 3Y

Now, I will present screenshots for 3Y, 1Y and 1M.

Foundry USA and Binance Pool have very speedy growths in the last one year.

3 years (3Y)

1 year (1Y)

1 month (1M)

[BlackBoss_]

Household Electricity Costs to Mine 1 Bitcoin at Home, Around the World

How Much Does it Cost to Mine 1 Bitcoin? (Household Electricity Costs)

The average household electricity cost to mine 1 Bitcoin is $46,291.24, which is 35% higher than the average daily price of 1 BTC in July 2023 ($30,090.08). The regional differences in household electricity costs are significant, with Europe standing out with the highest average cost of household electricity, estimated at $85,767.84.

In contrast, the Asian region boasts the lowest average cost for solo miners at $20,635.62 when mining 1 Bitcoin. This region stands as the sole territory where the average household electricity costs make mining profitable for a solo miner. Still, the disparity between Lebanon’s low electricity cost of $266.20 and Japan’s high cost of $64,111.02 accentuates the disparate nature of electricity expenses within the region.

Now let's see the most Profitable / Unprofitable Countries to Mine 1 BTC

The Most Unprofitable Countries to Mine 1 BTC

The top 10 countries where Bitcoin mining is most profitable due to low household electricity costs are predominantly in Asia and Africa:

Country   Electricity Cost to Mine 1 BTC (USD)
Lebanon   266.02
Iran   532.04
Syria   1330.1
Ethiopia   1596.12
Sudan   2128.17
Libya   2660.21
Kyrgyzstan   2660.21
Angola   3724.29
Zimbabwe   3990.31
Bhutan   4256.33

b]The Most Unprofitable Countries to Mine 1 BTC[/b]

It is unprofitable to mine Bitcoin in 82 countries, of which these are the top 10 most expensive countries with highest household electricity costs to mine 1 BTC:

Country   Electricity Cost to Mine 1 BTC (USD)
Italy   208,560.33
Austria   184,352.44
Belgium   172,381.50
Denmark   166,795.06
Germany   163,336.79
Ireland   159,612.50
Lithuania   152,163.92
Netherlands   137,798.79
United Kingdom   130,616.23
Cayman Islands   128,222.04

You can use Realized price from lookintobitcoin.com too.

[BlackBoss_]

Top Bitcoin mining companies ranked by marketcap.

According to companiesmarketcap.com, 18 largest Bitcoin miners by market capitalization companies have $8.13 B marketcap.

You can download the list in excel or make your suggestion to edit information.

Galaxy Digital Research, 2022 Mid-Year Bitcoin Mining Update (August 2022). It's downloadable in pdf.
Galaxy Digital Research, 2023 Mid-Year Bitcoin Mining Update.
60+ Bitcoin Mining and Energy Consumption Statistics For 2023 You Need to Know

[adaseb]

This is an interesting topic, surprised I didn’t notice in late last year. However for some reason all of the images are broken and I am given an error, it would be good if they can be reuploaded because without the images it seems half the info is missing.

Yeah I got into mining with a loud Antminer S2 that I got for almost nothing. Was a good learning experience and was fun to tinker with. I actually modified the voltage and swapped the fans and got it to run more quiet than stock. Missed that ASIC. They were more home friendly and retail oriented then, now most ASICS seem to go straight to large farms.

[BlackBoss_]

Eligius mining pool is back with a new name, Ocean mining pool.

Their pool: https://ocean.xyz

It is their slogan.

OCEAN is a new type of mining pool on a mission to radically decentralize Bitcoin mining

Dash board: https://ocean.xyz/dashboard

It is launched by Luke Dashjr. Read why he launched this pool.
https://ocean.xyz/about

In 2011, I started the Eligius mining pool.

At the time, GPU mining was just getting started and the difficulty increases made it obvious that miners needed to work together if they were going to have any regularity in payouts. Over the course of that early period we found many blocks (11,631) and helped the community mine a lot of bitcoins (348,326).

We were very successful, and we had a lot of loyal users who appreciated the transparency and non-custodial payout system of Eligius. Eventually, wizkid057 stepped up to maintain the pool and allow me to focus more on Bitcoin Core development before he also had to step away and shut down the pool. Since that time, the centralization and overreach of other pool operators has changed Bitcoin to the point where

the security model of Bitcoin is at high risk; we have already lost the censorship-resistant property many tout as one of Bitcoin's primary benefits.

Today, pools operate like custodial bank accounts and have the ability to decide who can and who can't use Bitcoin. The so-called "51%" attack vector is already a reality because it only actually takes 20-30% of network hashrate to have a good probability of getting away with an attack.

As for censorship, it is no longer a matter of actual resistance but merely if and when the pools choose to do it there are 11 entities who decide what transactions go in (or stay out) of almost every block, and simply the 2 largest can impose censorship on everyone else with 100% success. This is not some future risk but a present reality, and it's not sustainable if Bitcoin is to remain a permissionless currency.

As we stand today, Bitcoin is not a censorship resistant network, rather it just happens to be a network that is not currently being censored. As with other forms of centralization (hardware, firmware, ...), the role of mining pools must change for Bitcoin to exist as a truly decentralized currency.

To that end, I am relaunching Eligius as OCEAN, a new type of pool that enables miners to be truly miners again. At the start, we are already the most transparent pool giving you full visibility into block templates, generation payouts, miner stats, etc. As miners, you should have the ability to know what transactions you are mining with your hashrate. We are also the only non-custodial pool, making you, the miners, recipients of new block rewards directly from Bitcoin.

Over the next year, I will be redesigning the process of block template construction, leveraging and improving Stratum V2 where possible, to truly decentralize mining. We also plan to incorporate Lightning payouts which will solve the dust problem for small miners. This will also serve the dual benefit of bringing more liquidity to Lightning.

To make it worth everyone's effort to switch, OCEAN will be at 0% for the first 2 months of operation. After that we will need to introduce fees, but they will be kept reasonable and fair for all sizes of miners.

~ Luke Dashjr, 2023

[BlackBoss_]

Ocean mining pool found a new block 4 days ago but there is massive discussion on their initiative to censor Bitcoin transactions from Ordinals, Inscriptions.

Jack Dorsey-Backed Bitcoin Mining Pool Refuses To Process Ordinals Transactions – What’s Going On?

For years, basically Bitcoin communities did not like censorship and had a belief that Bitcoin blockchain and its network is an unique decentralized one among so many blockchains and networks.

Will this initiative be expanded to other Bitcoin mining pools?
If there is such an expansion for transaction censorship, what will appear next?

We are happy to announce testing of Bitcoin Knots v25.1 has completed successfully, and is now deployed to production. Among other improvements, this upgrade fixes this long-standing vulnerability exploited by modern spammers. As a result, our blocks will now include many more real transactions and help to bring an end to the DoS attack being performed on the #Bitcoin network.

So, in addition to our already-established benefits (transparency, non-custodial, and permissionless), we now also offer honest miners the first easy option to contribute toward blocks full of real transactions, effectively a several times larger block size in terms of transaction confirmations, without actually making the blocks any larger.

PSA: “Inscriptions” are exploiting a vulnerability in #Bitcoin Core to spam the blockchain. Bitcoin Core has, since 2013, allowed users to set a limit on the size of extra data in transactions they relay or mine (`-datacarriersize`). By obfuscating their data as program code, Inscriptions bypass this limit.

This bug was recently fixed in Bitcoin Knots v25.1. It took longer than usual due to my workflow being severely disrupted at the end of last year (v24 was skipped entirely).

Bitcoin Core is still vulnerable in the upcoming v26 release. I can only hope it will finally get fixed before v27 next year.

It is deployed with a Bitcoin Knots wallet software that went first with this initiative.

[BlackBoss_]

Marc Bevand
Electricity consumption of Bitcoin: a market-based and technical analysis
Ten phases of Bitcoin mining since 2009 to 2017 and different ASICs.

   Phase 0: 290 PH/s @ 0.51 J/GH (BM1384)3
    Phases 1-3: 150 PH/s @ 0.51 J/GH (BM1384)
    Phase 4: 40 PH/s @ 0.25 J/GH (BM1385)
    Phase 5: 191 PH/s @ 0.29 J/GH (A3218) +
    159 PH/s @ 0.25 J/GH (BM1385)
    Phase 6: 670 PH/s @ 0.25 J/GH (BM1385)
    Phase 7: 350 PH/s @ 0.20 J/GH (Bitfury 28nm)
    Phase 8: 150 PH/s @ 0.13 J/GH (BF8162C16)
    Phase 9: 1250 PH/s @ 0.15 J/GH (A3212)
    Average weighted by PH/s: 0.238 J/GH

University of Cambridge
Bitcoin electricity consumption: an improved assessment .
From CPUs to FGPAs and ASICs.

[BlackBoss_]

Total hashrate from Ocean Mining pool has been increasing about two times within one month since January 2024. It has been not stable yet but with their pool growth trend, it will be soon stable around 1 Eh/s.

https://ocean.xyz/dashboard

[franky1]

Total hashrate from Ocean Mining pool has been increasing about two times within one month since January 2024. It has been not stable yet but with their pool growth trend, it will be soon stable around 1 Eh/s.

https://ocean.xyz/dashboard

though their dashboard speaks of X00 participants. the very fact that 600peta joined the pool at the exact same time of jan 27th shows the top half of their pool is one participant..
..wasnt their premiss to be more decentralised..

[SFR10]

@BlackBoss_
I just discovered this thread for the very first time, so I'll be referring to some of your older posts...

• I don't think the following threads should be listed under the "mining pool announcement" category:
  
  

  • 2013
    ASICMINER: Entering the Future of ASIC Mining by Inventing It
    2014
    **US** BitFury Setup Guide
    [GUIDE] BitFury Miner Support/Tuning.
    [KnCMiner Guide] Connect to DirectPool, The Community-Driven Pool is Giving Back
    BTCMiners "Cloud Hashing" | $8.50 USD per GH/s!
    

  
  

• F2Pool「魚池」🐟. I am not so sure why the thread is in Altcoin board.
  

  F2Pool used to be on the "Pools" sub-board, but at some point in 2018/19 it was correctly moved to the "Pools (Altcoins)" sub-board ^{[If I were to guess. I'd say it was probably done by @frodocooper]}.
  ^{- It's not limited to Bitcoin.}
  
  

• Any one knows where to get hashrate distribution by payment systems like the table that is outdated and from 2018. In the first article, in 2018 hashrate distribution is: FPPS (51.7%), PPLNS (4.5%), PPS+ (43.7%), PPS (0%).
  
  Bitcoinexplorer.org's Mining summary has good plot and table for revenue, % revenue of mining pools but it does not have information about those pools' payment methods.
  

  In case you're still looking for this, "HashrateIndex" has it, but considering that the payment method for almost 40% of their listed pools is labeled as unknown, it might not be the most accurate data.
  ^{- Their pie chart is hidden under the Payment Methods tab.}
  

[BlackBoss_]

I don't think the following threads should be listed under the "mining pool announcement" category:

Could you explain why those threads are not relevant to be listed in my thread as "Mining pool announcement threads". Many of those pools are dead now but their announcement threads in the past can still be used as references.

In case you're still looking for this, "HashrateIndex" has it, but considering that the payment method for almost 40% of their listed pools is labeled as unknown, it might not be the most accurate data.

It is about 4% in two tabs (Pools by countries, Payment methods), not 40% but thank you for the link which is helpful for my thread.

[SFR10]

Could you explain why those threads are not relevant to be listed in my thread as "Mining pool announcement threads". Many of those pools are dead now but their announcement threads in the past can still be used as references.

Sure, here are my thoughts in exact order:

• It appears to be some sort of fundraiser.
• It's a guide for BitFury miners.
• Another guide for BitFury miners.
• It's a KnCMiner guide and the pool that was mentioned on that thread, apparently never became a working Bitcoin pool.
• It's a cloud mining announcement ^{[no matter how I look at it, I can't classify it as a proper pool]}.

It is about 4% in two tabs (Pools by countries, Payment methods), not 40% but thank you for the link which is helpful for my thread.

I should've been clearer ^{[my bad]}... When I made the above comment yesterday, 7 out of the 19 pools that were listed on their "Pools Ranking" list had the unknown label attached to them.
^{- For some reason, it's not reflecting on their charts and now, it's showing 4 out of 16 pools (25%) have unknown payout methods, so it appears to be a bit buggy at the moment.}

[BlackBoss_]

There is effort to attack Bitcoin Mining Industry in the USA.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration request mining companies to report their energy consumption.

EIA to initiate collection of data regarding electricity use by U.S. cryptocurrency miners.

I discovered a site for more information of Bitcoin mining pools and companies.

https://data.hashrateindex.com/stocks?tab=overview

Our Bitcoin Mining Stocks page lists all of the publicly listed Bitcoin miners and includes key statistics like Bitcoin mining stock prices, marketcaps, hashrate, trading volume, and more.

[Lockedout]

Total hashrate from Ocean Mining pool has been increasing about two times within one month since January 2024. It has been not stable yet but with their pool growth trend, it will be soon stable around 1 Eh/s.

https://ocean.xyz/dashboard

https://i.ibb.co/j6gd660/Ocean-Pool.png

though their dashboard speaks of X00 participants. the very fact that 600peta joined the pool at the exact same time of jan 27th shows the top half of their pool is one participant..
..wasnt their premiss to be more decentralised..

You could be right, but there could also be that somewhere else something happened that made people to leave another pool. Or, a indicator of a batch of new miners being delivered globally.
I find Tides promising, but I do not fully understand these things yet.

My only miner mines at Ocean though. I'm currently #112 in the ranking at 342 TH with a S21 Hydro, estimate is 40 days to first payout

[BlackBoss_]

Hash rate and found blocks from https://ocean.xyz/dashboard look to be better with time, higher hash rate and more found Bitcoin blocks.

Recently there is a discussion thread on one of earliest ASIC miner, Friedcat's Asic miner history is resurfacing the crypto space not his whereabout and it has some information that can be added to this thread.

According to Bitcoin electricity consumption from the University of Cambridge.

The first generation of ASICs was announced in 2012, that is exactly the year of Friedcat's announcement creation day in our forum but the source of this information does not write about Friedcat.

[1] PRWeb. (2012). Butterfly Labs Announces Next Generation ASIC Lineup. [online] Available at: https://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/6/prweb9611889.htm [Accessed 9 August 2023].

The link is dead, can not find today but searching with its title, I find an announcement thread in our forum
[Announcement] Butterfly Labs. It is on 1 August 2012.

The surprise is Friedcat's ASICMINER: Entering the Future of ASIC Mining by Inventing It is on 9 August 2012, 8 days after Butterfly's announcement.

[adaseb]

This is probably one of the best topics out there on the history of bitcoin mining.

I didnt realise that GPUs started to get into the bitcoin mining scene in 2010, and didnt know that the first BTC ASIC was introduced in 2013, when I joined the scene in late 2013, it seemed there was tons and tons of ASICs out already. I remember there was a miner like KnCMiner Jupiter/Saturn and there was a bigger ASIC called the TerraMiner. Both were crazy expensive at $10K or so which I couldnt afford.

Its amazing how we improved in the ASIC efficiency over the years, the chips get smaller and smaller and we get a much bigger hash out of them. Too bad bitcoin mining is out of reach for most retail users unfortuntely.

[BlackBoss_]

This is probably one of the best topics out there on the history of bitcoin mining.

Thank you.

I just read an interesting article of Bitcoin solo mining with data and information shared by CryptoQuant.
Solo Bitcoin Miner Wins Big After Securing an Entire Block Reward

Solo miners usually have historically had limited computing power to mine blocks, although new solo mining rigs like BitAxe claim to offer 500 Giga Hashes per second (GH/s).

"It is not a rare occurrence that a solo miner finds a block, it is just a low probability event," CryptoQuant's head of research Julio Moreno told CoinDesk. "However, this has been happening a little bit more frequent as there has been a growth in the production of small ASICs (mining equipment), which is specifically targeted to people that want to mine by their own from their own home."

Solo miner wins $200K Bitcoin lottery with just 0.012% of hashrate

The miner solved 14 Bitcoin blocks in the last year, receiving 59.3 Bitcoin, which is worth $3.5 million at current prices.