A mining pool (mining pool) is a service that combines the computing power of many miners for the joint mining of cryptocurrency. The emergence of pools was a natural stage in the development of mining: as network difficulty grew, the probability of finding a block alone (solo mining) for an individual participant fell to critically low values, and income became extremely irregular.

The principle of a pool's operation is to distribute the overall task among all participants. The pool splits the computational work into small parts — "shares", which miners process in parallel using special software. Combining power significantly increases the collective's chances of finding a block, and the reward received is distributed among the participants in proportion to the amount of work each has done.

Why a pool is needed

• it stabilizes income through regular, albeit smaller, payouts;
• it reduces the dependence of the result on chance;
• it allows participation in mining even with relatively modest equipment.

When choosing a pool, the size of the fee, the payout distribution scheme, the reliability of the service and its geographic proximity, which affects the share of stale shares, are taken into account.