What Is a Mining Pool?

A mining pool is a collective group of cryptocurrency miners who pool their computing power across a network to increase the likelihood that they will successfully locate a block or otherwise mine bitcoin.

How a Mining Pool Works

Individual members of a mining pool each contribute a portion of their computing power to the search for a block. The pool will be rewarded if they are successful in their efforts, usually in the form of the related cryptocurrency.

Rewards are typically distributed among the contributors according on how much of each person’s processing power or labour was donated overall. Individual miners may occasionally need to provide documentation of their labor in order to obtain compensation.

Anyone who wants to earn money by mining cryptocurrencies has two options: they can go it alone with their own specialized equipment or they can join a mining pool where several miners and their equipment work together to increase their hashing output. For instance, connecting six mining devices, each of which offers 335 mega hashes per second (MH/s), can result in a total mining power of 2 gigahashes, which will speed up the processing of the hash function.

Antpool

Antpool is an open access mining pool that supports ten cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ethereum (ETH) and litecoin (LTC). The mining pool offers an app that monitors the hash rate of users’ miners in real-time, supports multi-coin mining and shared account management for convenience.

Earnings are calculated depending upon the amount of hash power a user contributes to Antpool and their selected ‘earnings mode.’ Antpool supports multiple earning modes, including Pay Per Share (PPS), Pay Per Last N Shares (PPLNS), Pay Per Share Plus Transaction Fee (PPS+) and SOLO.

F2Pool

F2Pool (AKA DiscusFish) is a Chinese (Beijing) based mining pool founded in April 2013 that claims to be the largest pool of digital currencies and a leading bitcoin mining pool.

They also claim they have advanced anti-DDoS capabilities and hold themselves to a very high level of security.

For mining Bitcoin, f2pool calculates rewards using PPS+ (Pay Per Share+) and charges 2.5% from your rewards as commission. When the coins in your account reach the minimum threshold of 0.005 BTC, you will receive a payout within 24 hours.

Mining pools boost the likelihood of profitability by requiring less hardware and electricity from each individual member. Teaming up with other miners significantly increases the success rate, whereas a solo miner may have little chance of locating a block and earning a mining reward.