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What is a mining pool?
A mining pool is a group of Bitcoin miners who combine their hashing power and share the rewards. A small miner working alone may wait a very long time to find a block; in a pool, each member is paid regularly in proportion to the work they contribute.
What it means for you
In a pool you trade the occasional full block reward for smaller, steadier payouts, and payouts depend on the pool's own accounting of your shares. The pool, not you, usually decides which transactions go into the block: with the common stratum protocol, miners cannot even inspect them.
How it works
The pool sets a share target much easier to hit than the network's. Miners submit shares: hashes below the pool's target that prove work was done. When a share also meets the network target, it is a valid block, and the pool broadcasts it. That block's coinbase transaction pays the pool, which then pays members according to how many shares each submitted. Pools hand out work in two main ways: getblocktemplate lets miners see and modify the block's transactions, while stratum sends about a kilobyte of work and does not.
Source: Bitcoin Developer Guide: Mining · checked 4 October 2026
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