Glossary
Mining Pool
A coordinated group of PoW miners that combines hashrate, mines blocks together, and splits rewards proportionally — smoothing variance for individual miners.
Solo mining at modern Bitcoin difficulty is a lottery: even a multi-megawatt operation may go months between blocks. Mining pools solve this by combining hashrate, mining collaboratively, and splitting block rewards among participants based on "shares" (partial proofs of work) submitted.
Pool concentration is a recurring decentralization concern: just a few pools — Foundry USA, AntPool, ViaBTC — produce most Bitcoin blocks. "Stratum V2" decentralizes the transaction-selection role by letting individual miners choose their own template.