Mining Pool
A group of miners combining computing power to win block rewards and split them by contribution.
A mining pool pools the hash power of many participants so they can find blocks more often. Solo miners on Bitcoin might wait years to hit a block; in a pool, payouts arrive steadily, sized to each member's share of the work. The pool operator takes a small fee.
Pools make mining accessible but concentrate influence. When a few large pools control most of the network's hash rate, it revives fears of a 51% attack. In 2014, the pool GHash.io briefly approached that threshold on Bitcoin and asked miners to leave voluntarily.
Related terms
The process of competing with computing power to add new blocks and mint fresh coins under proof of work.
Hash RateThe total computing power a proof-of-work network throws at mining, measured in hashes per second.
51% AttackAn attack where one party controls most of a network's mining power and can rewrite recent transactions.