BitMinter stops mining.

In the following email Bitminter like other miners have pulled out of mining.

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

Please clear out all BTC, BCH and NMC from your account so nothing is left. If you don’t want the NMC then you can donate it under “my account” -> “donations and perks” in the website menu. There is a one-time donation mechanism near the top of that page.

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 are greatly appreciated. But the pool has shrunk so much that we might never find another block. Attempts to bring big miners on board 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 user’s 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.

—

Best regards,

Bitminter.com

What is Bitcoin mining?

Bitcoin mining is the process that generates new Bitcoins and processes transactions ont he blockchain.

But why has Bitminter and others shut down?

• Mining is now much more difficult and requires bigger hardware
• For the home user, mining bitcoin is out of reach – unless you rent miners from someone like Genesis Mining, you’re really restricted.

One of the main problems with mining was that there were a lot of scam sites. Even tests we did, sites came up and paid out, but then disappeared almost overnight. Some of them were terrible scams and are still around today. In the early days, I got scammed by them.

You can, of course, mine other coins like Etherium with your home computer. Bitminter has gone and I would imagine that other mining pools will disappear as well as more people opt for other investment and crypto strategies in the future.