ViaBTC has used its seventh anniversary to revisit the history of crypto mining, framing its own growth alongside the technological transformation of the Bitcoin network. The retrospective begins with the mining of Bitcoin’s Genesis Block on January 3, 2009, when Satoshi Nakamoto received a reward of 50 BTC, and follows the industry’s shift from hobbyist computing to specialized global infrastructure.
Mining hardware moved rapidly from CPUs to ASICs
According to the review, Bitcoin mining was initially designed to be accessible through standard PC CPUs. In Bitcoin’s earliest phase, the asset had little market value and attracted a small technical community. That changed in 2010, when Bitcoin developer and enthusiast Laszlo Hanyecz argued that GPUs could process more computations per second than CPUs and successfully applied them to mining. After Hanyecz shared GPU mining code with the community, Bitcoin’s hashrate jumped from 6 MH/s in January 2010 to 120 GH/s in December 2010, a 20,000-fold increase.
The article also recalls Hanyecz’s place in Bitcoin history beyond hardware innovation. He was the same figure behind the first widely cited real-world Bitcoin purchase, spending 10,000 BTC on two pizzas, a transaction that later became known as Bitcoin Pizza Day. In the anniversary narrative, that moment helped demonstrate practical value for the new digital currency at a time when mining and adoption were still tightly linked to experimentation.
As GPU mining pushed competition higher, miners searched for even more efficient hardware. In 2011, FPGA mining code appeared on GitHub, helping launch another phase in the professionalization of mining. ViaBTC’s review states that Bitcoin’s hashrate rose from 116 GH/s at the beginning of 2011 to nearly 30 TH/s by year-end, close to a 300x increase. The next major leap came in 2012 with the arrival of ASIC miners. Those machines drove Bitcoin’s hashrate from 20 TH/s to 12 PH/s, a 600-fold surge, and effectively established ASICs as the long-term dominant hardware standard over CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs.
Mining pools changed participation and revenue stability
Hardware improvements also created a new economic reality: as total hashrate expanded, solo mining became increasingly difficult for smaller participants. The review highlights the founding of Slush Pool in 2010 by Czech programmer Marek Palatinus as a turning point. By pooling computational resources and distributing rewards among participants, mining pools offered a way to smooth revenue and keep smaller miners involved in the network.
Still, the rise of pools introduced new operational and centralization risks. ViaBTC points to the case of GHash.IO, which grew quickly in 2013 by offering a zero-fee policy. By 2014, the pool’s hashrate had at one point exceeded 51% of the Bitcoin network, triggering concerns across the community about network security and concentration of power. The pool later shut down in 2016 after repeated large-scale DoS attacks. In ViaBTC’s telling, that episode illustrated a broader lesson: mining pools require robust infrastructure, strong security, and sustained technical capability to survive in a volatile environment.
ViaBTC’s entry into a highly competitive pool market
It was in that context that ViaBTC entered the sector. The company says founder Haipo Yang, described in the article as an early Bitcoin builder, saw that mining pool technology and products were still immature and decided to build a more stable and efficient platform. He reportedly completed the coding of ViaBTC Pool independently in just two months, and the service officially launched on June 5, 2016.
The company argues that one of its early contributions was the launch of the PPS+ payout model, built on top of conventional PPS and PPLNS methods. ViaBTC says the structure allowed miners to benefit from more stable mining income while also sharing transaction fee revenue, helping users earn more than they could under earlier payout systems. The article further claims that the PPS+ approach was later adopted by mainstream pools and helped reshape industry practices around miner compensation.
Product and infrastructure as key differentiators
Beyond payout design, ViaBTC’s anniversary piece emphasizes technical infrastructure as a core differentiator. The company says it optimized the Bitcoin network’s broadcasting and transmission process through its self-developed BTC client. Combined with globally distributed high-speed block update networks, those efforts were intended to help miners discover and propagate new blocks more quickly.
According to the review, this system reduced orphan rates, improved network operating efficiency, and supported more stable miner revenue. ViaBTC states that it continues to maintain the lowest orphan rate among mining pools, though the anniversary article does not provide a comparative table in the text cited here. The company presents this claim as evidence that long-term competitiveness in mining depends not only on scale, but also on latency management, software optimization, and security resilience.
ViaBTC also highlights a broader product suite developed over the years around mining operations and related services. These include a Transaction Accelerator, Auto Conversion, Smart Mining, Hedging Service, Crypto Loans, Hashrate Fluctuation Notification, Revenue Sharing, and Referral Commission. In the company’s framing, these tools were designed to make mining faster, more stable, and more profitable for users, while also expanding into adjacent services tied to miner treasury management and operational flexibility.
Seven years of survival in a volatile industry
The anniversary review repeatedly returns to one central message: durability matters in crypto mining. ViaBTC contrasts its own trajectory with pools that were undermined by cyberattacks, unstable cash flows, or inconsistent block production. The text argues that maintaining a user-focused product strategy and investing in technology allowed the company to navigate an industry known for abrupt failures and rapid competitive turnover.
As of the anniversary milestone, ViaBTC says it provides mining services to more than 1 million users across over 130 countries and regions. It also states that its platform supports mining for more than 10 cryptocurrencies, including BTC and LTC, and remains a major participant by hashrate in several mainstream assets. The company further says its cumulative mining output is worth multiple billions of dollars, though the article does not break that figure down by asset or time period.
In practical terms, the retrospective offers a concise history of how Bitcoin mining evolved from an activity accessible on consumer computers into a specialized industry shaped by industrial hardware, distributed infrastructure, and increasingly sophisticated service providers. It also shows how the mining pool business itself matured, with revenue models, security, uptime, and auxiliary financial tools becoming just as important as raw hashrate.
A corporate anniversary with a broader industry message
Although the article is a sponsored post centered on ViaBTC’s anniversary, it also functions as a broader narrative about the institutionalization of crypto mining. The transition from CPU to GPU, FPGA, and ASIC hardware reflects more than technical progress; it marks the steady rise of specialization and capital intensity in the Bitcoin economy. Likewise, the move from solo mining to pooled mining mirrors the need for coordination as network difficulty and competition increase.
ViaBTC closes its anniversary message by saying it plans to continue offering professional, efficient, secure, and stable mining services while expanding a wider set of crypto products. Whether read as a corporate milestone or an industry recap, the review underlines a clear conclusion: the history of mining is a history of constant adaptation, and only operators able to combine technology, reliability, and product depth have managed to remain relevant over the long term.