What is Mining pool?
A coordinator that combines many miners' hashrate and distributes rewards proportionally, smoothing income that would otherwise be extremely lumpy.
A solo miner with a small share of network hashrate might find a block once a decade. Pools let participants receive steady payouts proportional to work contributed.
The trade-off is concentration: pools have historically chosen which transactions go into blocks, which is a real centralisation concern even though the underlying hashrate belongs to independent operators who can and do switch pools.
Related terms
Mining
The process of assembling candidate blocks and searching for a valid proof of work, rewarded with the block…
MiningHashrate
The estimated total computing power searching for Bitcoin blocks, usually quoted in exahashes per second…
NetworkCentralisation risk
The concentration of mining, custody, development or infrastructure into few enough hands to create a…
This definition is part of the Bitcoin Logical glossary. For the fuller explanation, start with Learn, or see the live numbers on The Bitcoin Signal.