Mining pool

In the context of cryptocurrency mining, a mining pool is the pooling of resources by miners, who share their processing power over a network, to split the reward equally, according to the amount of work they contributed to the probability of finding a block. A "share" is awarded to members of the mining pool who present a valid partial proof-of-work. Mining in pools began when the difficulty for mining increased to the point where it could take centuries for slower miners to generate a block. The solution to this problem was for miners to pool their resources so they could generate blocks more quickly and therefore receive a portion of the block reward on a consistent basis, rather than randomly once every few years.[1][2]

  1. ^ Ittay Eyal with Emin Gün Sirer:"Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable Archived 2016-12-03 at the Wayback Machine" in the 18th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security(FC).2014
  2. ^ Eyal, Ittay. "The Miner's Dilemma" (PDF). Cornell University. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2017-08-09. Retrieved 2017-05-23., In the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), 2015.