Mining pool

Related terms

Share

A share is a hash a miner submits to a pool that meets the pool's own easier target rather than the network's, serving as verifiable proof of the work the miner has done so the pool can measure each miner's contribution.

Pool fee

A pool fee is the percentage of mining rewards a pool keeps for running the service, commonly between 0% and 4% where operators publish it, with PPS and FPPS pools tending to charge more than PPLNS pools because they carry the variance.

PPS

PPS (pay per share) is a pool payout scheme that pays a fixed amount for every accepted share, calculated from the expected value of that share at the current difficulty, so the pool absorbs all the variance and usually charges a higher fee for doing so.

PPLNS

PPLNS (pay per last N shares) is a payout scheme that distributes each block the pool actually finds among the shares submitted in a window before that block, so miners bear the pool's luck and a miner who leaves shortly before a block forfeits some of the reward.

FPPS

FPPS (full pay per share) is a payout scheme that pays the PPS rate for the block subsidy plus a proportional share of the average transaction fees earned per block, so miners receive fee revenue without bearing block-finding variance.

Solo mining

Solo mining is mining without a pool, or through a solo pool that passes the whole block reward to whichever miner finds the block, so the miner keeps everything but may wait months or years between payouts.