Foundations of Blockchain

Mining pool

We are aware that mining difficulty in Bitcoin is adjusted to maintain an average block creation time of 10 minutes. But due to high competition among miners, the difficulty of solving the hash puzzle has increased over time.

This has forced the miners to upgrade their hardware to achieve higher hash rates. Miners who had limited resources couldn't compete with miners who owned huge computing resources. This was when the mining pool was introduced to pool the resources of individual miners with limited resources.

A mining pool is a pooling of computing resources of miners to share the computing power and attain a higher hash rate to solve the hash puzzle. If the combined hash power of the mining pool solves the hash puzzle for ...