The first Bitcoin mining pool launched, called Slushpool

On November 27, 2010, the launch of the first Bitcoin mining pool, Slush Pool occured. Slush Pool, initially known as Bitcoin Pooled Mining Server, was introduced by Marek “Slush” Palatinus, a programmer from the Czech Republic. The concept of a mining pool was revolutionary; it allowed individual miners to combine their computational resources to increase their chances of solving a block and earning Bitcoin rewards.
 

Before the advent of mining pools, Bitcoin mining was predominantly a solo activity. However, as the network grew and the difficulty of mining increased, it became less viable for individual miners with limited resources to compete. Slush Pool offered a solution to this problem by distributing the mining rewards across pool participants proportionally to the amount of work they contributed.
 

Slush Pool operated on a share strategy that involved an artificially low difficulty method, which was later determined to be vulnerable to cheating. This led to the adoption of a score-based method, where older shares from the beginning of the round had a lower value than newer shares, discouraging dishonesty and pool-hopping.