Crypto Mining Pools Compared

You connect to a pool server

Your miner is configured with the pool's stratum server address, a worker name, and your payout wallet. From that point, the pool — not your own node — hands your machine what to work on.

The pool assembles block templates

The pool builds candidate blocks from its own mempool and sends each connected miner a slightly different piece of the search space, so nobody wastes effort duplicating another miner's work.

You submit shares, not just blocks

A "share" is a hash that meets an easier, pool-set difficulty — far more common than an actual block. Submitting shares proves you are genuinely contributing hashrate, long before anyone finds a real block.

Someone in the pool finds a block

Statistically, it will not be your exact machine most of the time — it will be whichever participant's hash happened to also satisfy the full network difficulty. The pool broadcasts it exactly like a solo miner would.

The reward is split by contribution

The pool credits every participant based on the shares they submitted over the relevant window, using whichever payout scheme the pool runs — see the next section for the differences that actually matter.

Payouts land in your wallet

Once your accumulated balance clears the pool's minimum payout threshold, it is sent to the wallet address you configured — automatically, on the schedule the pool publishes.

You are paid a fixed amount for every share submitted, regardless of whether the pool actually finds a block. Smooth, predictable income — the pool absorbs all the luck-based variance, usually in exchange for a slightly higher fee.

Rewards are split among the last N shares submitted around when a block is actually found. Income more closely tracks the pool's real luck — worse during dry spells, better right after a lucky streak — usually for a lower fee than PPS.

Works like PPS but also folds in an estimated share of transaction fees from found blocks, not just the fixed block subsidy. Common on Bitcoin pools, where fees can be a meaningful part of total reward.

A variant of FPPS that distributes actual collected transaction fees rather than an estimate, so payouts reflect exactly what the pool earned in fees rather than a modeled average.

An older scheme that splits each found block's reward among the shares submitted since that specific block started — simple, but vulnerable to pool-hopping strategies that PPLNS was designed to fix.

Some pools also offer a solo mode: you use their infrastructure, but only get paid if your own hashrate finds the block, keeping the full reward minus a smaller fee. High variance, same lottery odds as true solo mining.