Mining Pool
A group of miners combining hash power and splitting rewards proportionally.
Solo mining a modern network is a lottery with terrible odds, so miners join pools. The pool coordinates work across thousands of machines, and when it finds a block it distributes the reward according to each member’s contributed shares.
Pools smooth income into a steady stream, but they also concentrate influence. Analysts watch pool market share because a single pool nearing half the network’s hash rate raises security concerns.