Mining Pool
Miners combining hash power to earn steady proportional payouts instead of rare jackpot blocks.
A mining pool aggregates many miners’ hash rate; when the pool finds a block, rewards split proportionally to contributed work. Solo mining Bitcoin with even serious hardware means years between wins; pools convert the lottery into a salary, minus a small fee.
Pools concentrate block-building power, which is the decentralization concern — a handful of large pools assemble most Bitcoin blocks. Mitigations are evolving (protocols letting individual miners choose their own block templates, like Stratum V2). Note the trust structure: pooled miners never custody the network, but they do briefly trust the pool operator to pay honestly.