Bitminter had been mining for 9 years. When it shut down there was a lot of experience and in-house developed software that seemed a waste to throw away. Now that is part of XBTO Digital instead.

Mining has changed a lot. From individual mining to mining pools. From CPUs to GPUS, to FPGAs, to ASICs. From individuals mining at home to companies running big mining operations. From any individual being able to start a mining pool, to pools run by companies. Companies that have their own big mining operations, or is otherwise connected to one. Otherwise the pool won't reach critical mass.

Bitminter could not survive how the mining world changed in recent years. So now we bring the best of Bitminter to a bigger and more viable operation.

Bitminter mining pool shut down, so you have to find a different mining pool.


You can't mine bitcoin with CPU or GPU anymore. If you want to mine bitcoin then you need to buy a modern bitcoin ASIC miner. Check out the bitcoin mining hardware section of bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=76.0

You can still mine some altcoins with GPU/CPU. If you want to try that, look in the altcoin mining section of bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=160.0


To mine with your GPU you'll need OpenCL working. If you have an AMD or Nvidia graphics card then you probably just need to install a driver from AMD/Nvidia. Someone who knows Ubuntu 20.04 better can correct me. But I think the default driver is an open source driver which does not support OpenCL which mining needs.

The website is up and working for a lot of people. But you are the second person to ask about the website being down.

Are you getting a Cloudflare page saying our server is down? Most likely it is Cloudflare in your region that is having issues. Unfortunately they always show this error page claiming it is the destination server that is down.

You can wait and try again later. Or if you have another Internet Service Provider then you can try that (for example on mobile).

You can also contact support@bitminter.com and give me your IP address there and I can try to figure out what's going on. Actually I don't need your exact IP address, it's enough with your ASN. It can identify your ISP/network, but not you. You can find your IP address with a free service like https://www.myip.com/ and you could look up its ASN with e.g. https://iptoasn.com/

Thank you all for having mined with Bitminter.

Mining has now ended on the Bitminter servers after 9 years of almost non-stop mining.

Unless P2pool is still around, I believe Slush pool is now the last of the old pools that is still up. I hope they keep going!

Is Bitminter the last 2011-pool to shut down? Or are there any pools from 2011 still running?

2011 was a year a lot of Bitcoin pools started. Not sure how many it was, but it was quite a few.

Bitminter shutdown notice

The Bitminter mining pool will shut down mining activities on 2020-07-01. The website will stay up until 2021-06-01 so you can cash out any crypto currency on your account.

It is unfortunate to have to shut down after 9 years of mining. However, to keep going would not be fair to the few miners we have left in the pool. The efforts of miners who have tried to keep the pool going is greatly appreciated. But the pool has shrunk so much that we might never find another block. Attempts to bring big miners onboard did not work out.

A big thank you to everyone who mined with Bitminter over the years. This has been a grand adventure.

The original purpose of Bitminter was to make mining accessible to those who found other mining software difficult to operate. For many of our users mining in this pool was their first experience with bitcoin. I hope you enjoyed it and that you are still part of the bitcoin community.

Hopefully Bitminter was a useful service for you.

Best of luck for the future.

Today Bitcoin has been live for 11 years!

This would be a good day for another block.

Your page at https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/index.php?title=BitMinter contains links to a fake Bitminter website which is pretending to be Bitminter, but is in reality an investment scam.

I created an account at bitcoinwiki.org and submitted an edit which would remove the scam text and link. Now I see the edit has been rejected and my account has been deleted.

Nice going supporting scams, bitcoinwiki.org.

It may seem most fair that if you did 10% of the work between the time blocks A and B were found, then you get 10% of the coins paid out for block B. Because "you did 10% of the work needed to find block B".

That may seem like a fair system with no loophole. Unfortunately this is the proportional reward system which has a nasty loophole that gets abused. It is a very unfair reward system. Pool hoppers get paid much more than the 24/7 miners, on their expense.

PPLNS ("pay per last N shares/shifts"), pays the last N amount of work, for some number N. It may feel unfair if you did some work and it was no longer among the "last N shifts" when the block gets found so it didn't get paid. Then a big miner arrives, does a lot of work, after which several lucky blocks are found, so their work gets paid multiple times. It may feel like they are using a loophole. In fact it is completely random and could easily have been the other way around.

With PPLNS when you do a bit of work it is completely random whether it gets paid zero, one, two, or even more times. There is no way to predict it. There is no loophole.

If you feel bad that a big miner did most of the work in a shift that got paid 3 times because we found 3 lucky blocks, while you got "squeezed out" of this shift and didn't profit as much as you would have hoped - it was random. It could have been a shift that got paid zero times. In that case the big miner saved you by taking a larger share of this unlucky period of mining.

Mining is a lottery. Sometimes you get lucky and other times unlucky. The important thing for fairness is that the reward system makes it impossible to know whether future payouts will be high or low. That ensures a fair system with no loopholes.

They got very good payouts because we had a bunch of lucky blocks in a row.

But that's only due to luck. And you can't predict future luck. So yes, gambling is the right word. But there are no stats or anything at all to improve your gambling odds.

Some people do believe that if you are lucky today then you will be lucky tomorrow as well. Other people believe that if you are lucky today then you have to be unlucky tomorrow because it has to even out. It makes no sense at all. But I guess people have their superstitions.

You can't do this with PPLNS. That is the whole reason PPLNS was invented, to prevent pool hopping.

Pool hopping was a problem in the olden days when pools used the proportional reward method. You can read about it here: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5072/what-is-pool-hopping

Today marks 8 years since the launch of Bitminter. Thank you to all who mine and mined with Bitminter over the years.

This network was blocked because of the amount of spam coming from them. I've removed the block - try it again now.

That's a shame indeed. Hopefully 3 years until the next one.

Finally that long round is over. Thanks a lot to skywise who found the block!

Apologies for the delay in BTC payouts this time. Prepay users have now been paid and the countdown for confirming the block is now showing correctly at https://bitminter.com/blocks - everyone not using the prepay perk will be paid as soon as the block confirms, as usual.

Bitcoin went live with the genesis block exactly ten years from today!

The idea is to collect your coins from any places where you don't control the private keys, to wallets where you do.

There are some wallet suggestions at https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet

When you click on one, you can see whether it allows you to control your own coins. Some wallets have a green dot next to "Control over your money" and if you click that, it shows "This wallet gives you full control over your bitcoins. This means no third party can freeze or lose your funds. You are however still responsible for securing and backing up your wallet."

When you hold your own coins yourself, you have to protect them from hackers and make sure you have backups. A hardware wallet can help in case your PC gets hacked.

The advantage is that you actually have your coins. Maybe your coins are held today by the next mtgox disaster. Maybe they already lost your coins, they just haven't told you yet?

Remember to withdraw your coins in time for the annual Proof of Keys!

https://www.proofofkeys.com/

Thank you - hope that gives us some luck

BCH withdrawals are enabled again.

If you are no longer mining, then please cash out all your coins (BTC, NMC and BCH) from Bitminter.

Proof of keys celebration is coming up. Take control of your coins; withdraw today. https://www.proofofkeys.com/