Mining pool

In plain words

Winning a block alone is a lottery; even a warehouse of machines might wait years. A pool trades luck for wages: thousands of miners work through a coordinator, prove their effort, and split every prize in proportion to work done. Steady pay instead of jackpots. The cost: the pool's operator usually chooses which transactions get mined.

Why it matters

• Small-scale mining becomes survivable.
• The worry: a handful of big pools assemble most blocks.
• Pool power is borrowed, never owned — miners switch overnight.

Not to be confused with

• Cloud mining — renting promised hashrate from a company; historically riddled with scams.

Go deeper

• Solo mining
• Block reward
• Hashrate