GHash.io claims nearly $250 million in BTC mined in first year

It may seem strange, given its now-significant impact on the bitcoin mining community, but BitFury-backed mining pool GHash.io launched only a year ago.

In that time, the pool has drawn both immense praise (for providing a stable payout system, top-notch merged mining and modern mining dashboard)  and severe criticism (for unapologetically seizing the majority of the bitcoin network, crashing the price and creating unambiguous proof that a 51% attack was possible).

Love them or hate them, there’s no ignoring the force that GHash has become.

A new post on the official blog of GHash parent company CEX.io puts the pool’s impact on the bitcoin network into terms almost anyone can understand: Dollars and cents. Since its launch on August 3, 2013, GHash has created over 413,750 BTC, or just under $250 million.

By any measure, that’s a lot of bitcoin. For perspective, that’s 382,760,564,258,698,078,191,616 hashes, solving over 150,000 blocks and confirming over 6 million transactions. All that hashing has taken its share of electricity, consuming 159,519,788 kilowatt hours in the process. No matter how you look at it, GHash,io is a behemoth.

Who is doing all that mining? If you’re reading this post, it may well include you. The pool claims to have over 220,000 registered users.