Glossary · Mining Pools
Variance
Also: luck, pool luck
Variance in mining is the gap between the blocks a miner or pool statistically expects to find and the blocks it actually finds over a period, which pools report as luck and which shrinks as a proportion of income as hashrate and time increase.
Related terms
- 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.
- 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.
- Mining pool
- A mining pool is a service that combines the hashrate of many miners, submits blocks on their behalf and splits the resulting block rewards according to the work each miner contributed, turning rare large payouts into small frequent ones.
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