Mining Pool

A mining pool is a group of miners who combine hash rate and share the block rewards, so participants earn small, regular payouts instead of waiting years for the chance to find a block alone. The pool operator distributes work, collects valid shares from members and pays out under a scheme such as pay-per-share or proportional, minus a fee. Pools make mining viable for small operators, but they concentrate influence: a pool commands the combined power of its members, and if one grows very large the network's decentralisation assumptions weaken. Miners also depend on the operator to account honestly for shares and to decide which transactions go into the blocks their hash rate produces.