15 years ago, the first Bitcoin mining pool was introduced by coder Slush. This was the birth of Bitcoin CZ, which would become Slush Pool, and is still operating today under the moniker of Braiins Pool. The group claims to have mined 1,311,339 bitcoins over the last 15 years, which would be worth $115 billion at today's valuation, or $162 billion at Bitcoin's peak valuation earlier this year.
The first and original mining pool started with 60,000 KH/s of power. In 2025, this pool goes brrr-kerching at 13.56 EH/s. Thus, it wields about 225 billion times more computing power than its original incarnation.
15 years ago today, the first Bitcoin mining pool was invented, ending the era of pure solo mining. It allowed many miners to work together on the same block and split rewards more consistently. That pool was Bitcoin CZ, later Slush Pool, now Braiins Pool, still operating. pic.twitter.com/OY8Lb6pLSUDecember 16, 2025
By 2010, Bitcoin cryptomining rewards were simply becoming too variable for most solo participants to feel comfortable in their high-wattage pursuit. The difficulty of finding a block had reached the point where the mass of home enthusiasts could still mine BTC, but the painful gaps between striking crypto gold gave birth to the idea of pooling resources for a more steady, reliable, flow of income.
Mining collaborations don’t always have the desired outcome. ‘Gold’ can make men mad with desire, as seen in John Huston’s 1948 classic neo-Western, the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. However, history shows Slush and the community have put together a collaboration that would last.
The Bitcoin CZ originator noted that the mining pool server was based on an equitable sharing of rewards principle, and it worked with major CPU/GPU miners of the time. In contrast with mining solo, Bitcoin CZ would save blocks of crypto to the server wallet, and individual miners could get BTC sent to their own wallets based upon a personal customizable threshold.
Braiins Pool is now 225 billion times more powerful
From its humble forum-discussion beginnings to today, the world’s longest running cryptomining pool has grown at an astonishing rate. In the intro, we highlighted that the pool had grown from a combined 60,000 KH/s to 13.56 EH/s of hashing power. This represents a 225 billion times increase in computing power.
Bitcoin is worth around 400,000 times more than it was in December 2010
At the time the first Bitcoin pool was set up, on December 16, 2010, the value of 1 BTC was 22 cents. Along its spiky history, we saw the first astonishingly rapid BTC inflation in June 2011, with its value passing $26. The next great spike was in Nov/Dec 2013, with BTC breaking the $1,000 milestone. In 2017, it almost hit $20,000. Another milestone spike was when BTC rose above $67,000 in late 2021.
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