Bitcoin glossary
Mining pool
Miners combining hashrate to smooth out the lottery of finding blocks.
A mining pool combines many miners’ hashrate so they find blocks regularly as a group and split the rewards, instead of each miner waiting years for a solo win. Payout schemes differ mainly in who carries the luck: FPPS-style pools pay expected value (the pool carries variance); PPLNS-style pay from actual blocks found.
Pools coordinate hashrate but do not control Bitcoin’s rules — nodes do. Still, pool concentration is a real decentralization concern, which newer designs like Stratum V2 and OCEAN’s miner-built templates address.
The live number
Pools compared by payout scheme