Mining pool
In plain words
A mining pool combines the hashrate of many miners so they get small, regular payouts instead of waiting years for a whole block.
Largest pools right now
- 1.Foundry USA26.2%
- 2.AntPool20.5%
- 3.F2Pool16.2%
- 4.ViaBTC8.6%
- 5.SpiderPool7.1%
Share of blocks found in the last 7 days · mempool.space · 22 Oct, 20:05 London
How pools work
The pool hands out work at a lower difficulty than the network's. Every solution that meets the pool's target is a “share”, proof of the work you did; once in a while a share also meets the network target and becomes a real block. Rewards are split by shares according to a payout scheme.
Pool operators traditionally pick the transactions in the block, so concentration of hashrate in a few pools is a censorship and centralization concern. Stratum V2 Job Declaration and DATUM give that choice back to miners.
See also
- Pool payout schemes (PPS, PPLNS, FPPS, TIDES)A payout scheme is how a mining pool shares block rewards among its miners. The main question is who carries the luck: the pool (steady pay, higher fee) or the miners (variable pay, lower fee).
- Stratum V2Stratum V2 is the newer protocol between miners and pools. It encrypts the connection, uses compact binary messages and, optionally, lets the miner rather than the pool choose which transactions go into a block.
- MiningMining is the work that adds new blocks to Bitcoin. Miners run special computers (ASICs) that guess numbers; the winner of each round earns the block subsidy and the fees.
- HashrateHashrate is how many guesses per second all Bitcoin miners make together. More hashrate means more energy protecting the network.
References
- mempool.space: mining pools mempool.space
- 0xB10C: block template similarity between pools b10c.me