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Crypto mining basics

What is a mining pool?

Last updated: July 23, 2026

What a mining pool does, why miners join one instead of mining alone, and how a pool turns your shares into a steady, predictable income.

Mining alone is feast or famine

On your own, you only earn when your rig personally finds a block. For most miners that could mean waiting weeks or months between rewards, with nothing in between. The long-run average might be fine, but the wait is brutal and unpredictable.

A pool shares the luck

A mining pool combines the hashrate of many miners so the group finds blocks far more often. When any member finds a block, the reward is split across everyone in proportion to the work they contributed. You trade the rare big win for many small, steady payouts of the same long-run value.

The miner dashboard summarising a single miner's contribution and balances
Your dashboard shows your slice of the pool: your hashrate, your pending and paid balances.

What the pool does for you

The pool runs the full nodes, builds the work your miner solves, verifies every share, tracks each miner's contribution, and sends payouts automatically. You just point a miner at it with your wallet address. On this pool there is no account: your address is your identity and your payout destination.

What it costs

Pools charge a small fee on rewards for running all of that. Here it is one flat fee, the same for proportional pool mining and solo, shown live on the pool statistics and deducted automatically with no other charges. In exchange you get steady income, live stats, and infrastructure you do not have to run yourself.

Ready to put this into practice?
Pick a coin on the pools overview and open its How to Mine guide for a ready-to-run command.
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