May 2018 update – While bitminter mining pool remains online, the mining pool mined less than 2 dozen blocks during all of 2017, and only 2 blocks in 2018 so far, so the information in this article may be out of date as it was originally published in 2015.
A look at the Bitminter Bitcoin Mining Pool
Please note: This review is based on a relatively small amount of hashing, a few hundred ghs. The stats outlined in this review may not apply to larger miners. We hacked our antminer S1’s to mine nine pools concurrently, letting us run proportional power across a wide variety of mining pools. This review is part of our series of bitcoin mining pool reviews.
Bitminter are a long established bitcoin mining pool that, in it’s time, mined over 195,000 bitcoin, but has been overtaken by many others in more recent time. However, they still continue to regularly find blocks, and have a steady group of miners keeping them finding blocks every couple of days.
The pool uses a scoring system to determine it’s payout. Shifts are divided into groups of 10, with a new shift starting when 1/10 of the current difficulty is passed, or a block is found. Payouts are based on a 1 terrahash proportion, and added to your account. Being an older pool, it has a long established group of miners on it, which are semi-active on various bitcoin places. The pool mines bitcoin and namecoin, and you can put your wallet address in to receive earnings. The payout threshold for bitcoin is pretty low, with automatic payouts at 0.01 bitcoin, and even if you only have a modest amount of hashing power, you can make an manual payment for amounts less than this.
One thing I noticed compared to pretty much every pool is that you can’t just register with an email address/password, or a bitcoin address. Instead, the pool allows forces you to sign up using open id, gmail and a wide range of accounts, although many social media ones like facebook and twitter aren’t included. This may turn off people who don’t want to share this information with the pool owners.
Once registered, you’re presented with a dashboard, and can start setting things up. The pool originally was set up to run a mining client for CPU’s and GPU’s, although these have been made redundant by ASICs. It does have a couple of different ways of monitoring your client, with in-screen and popout options, and a decent mix of information. However, it doesn’t feature 2FA as a security method.
The pool has a 1% fee, but has optional perks that you can get by increasing your donations, such as getting credited to your account before the block has confirmed. The pool also is still actively maintained with regular support, and an active presence on the forums. We had changed domain for our email address and had to email in the support address, and were very pleasantly surprised when within a couple of hours we got a friendly answer back and a solution to our login problem.
So in conclusion, Bitminter isn’t one of the biggest bitcoin mining pools on the network compared to when it started back in 2011, but having found over 6000 blocks in it’s time, and still doing so every day, it has a loyal base of users who are keeping it going, finding blocks regularly.
