What is bitcoin mining pool

What is bitcoin mining pool

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What is bitcoin mining pool

Вы новичок в биткоине и криптовалюте? Прочтите несколько простых руководств и ресурсов для начинающих.

Впервые имеете дело с биткоином?

Просмотрите руководства для начинающих ниже и начните свое путешествие в мир криптовалюты. Эти руководства помогут вам быстрее освоить важные темы независимо от вашего текущего уровня знаний.

Изучите основы

Познакомьтесь с биткойном и узнайте, почему это важно

Изучите основы

Познакомьтесь с биткойном и узнайте, почему это важно

Как получить биткоины?

Чтобы получить биткоины, просто предоставьте отправителю свой адрес, но убедитесь, что вы предоставляете правильный адрес

Как получить биткоины?

Чтобы получить биткоины, просто предоставьте отправителю свой адрес, но убедитесь, что вы предоставляете правильный адрес

Как купить биткоины?

Узнайте, как получить свои первые биткоины за считанные минуты

Как купить биткоины?

Узнайте, как получить свои первые биткоины за считанные минуты

Больше популярных статей

Что такое биткоин?

Биткоин основан на идеях, изложенных в документе 2008 года, озаглавленном Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System («Биткоин: одноранговая система электронных денег»)

Как продать биткоины?

Узнайте, как безопасно продавать биткоины в своей местной валюте

Как отправить биткоины?

Отправить биткоин очень просто — укажите сумму для отправки и решите, куда она отправится

Как мне сохранить свои биткоины в безопасности?

Убедитесь, что ваши цифровые активы в безопасности, с помощью этих простых советов

Как создать биткоин-кошелек?

Создать биткоин-кошелек очень просто — нужно всего лишь установить программное обеспечение на мобильное устройство или компьютер

Как работают криптокошельки?

Вам нужен кастодиальный кошелек или нет? Как вы можете защитить свои средства?

Как работают криптобиржи?

Насколько безопасно хранить свою криптовалюту на централизованных биржах?

Как биткоин облагается налогом?

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Bitcoin Mining Pools

Now that you have Bitcoin mining hardware, your next step is to join a Bitcoin mining pool or buy bitcoin.

What is a Mining Pool?

Mining pools are groups of cooperating miners who agree to share block rewards in proportion to their contributed mining hash power.

While mining pools are desirable to the average miner as they smooth out rewards and make them more predictable, they unfortunately concentrate power to the mining pool’s owner.

Miners can, however, choose to redirect their hashing power to a different mining pool at anytime.

Finding a good mining pool is important because its going to save you money.

Pool Concentration in China

Before we get into the best mining pools to join, it’s important to note that most mining pools are in China. Many only have Chinese websites and support. Mining centralization in China is one of Bitcoin’s biggest issues at the moment.

There are about 20 major mining pools. Broken down by the percent of hash power controlled by a pool, and the location of that pool’s company, we estimate that Chinese pools control

65% of the network hash rate:

Bitcoin Wallets

Before joining a mining pool:

You’ll need a bitcoin wallet. Why?

This is because all Bitcoin mining pools will ask you for a Bitcoin address that will be used to send your mining rewards and payouts.

Our guide on the best bitcoin wallets will help you get a wallet. Read the full guide.

The Biggest Mining Pools

The list below details the biggest Bitcoin mining pools:

We strongly recommend new miners to join Poolin or Slush Pool.

1. F2pool

F2Pool is based in China. It mines about 19% of all blocks.

2. Antpool

Antpool is a mining pool based in China and owned by BitMain. Antpool mines about 14% of all blocks.

3. ViaBTC

ViaBTC is a somewhat new mining pool that has been around for about one year. It’s targeted towards Chinese miners and mines about 12% of all blocks.

4. Poolin

Poolin is a public pool which mines about 12% of all blocks. They are based in China, but have a website fully available in English.

5. Binance Pool

Binance Pool is a fast growing pool owned and operated by Malta-based exchange Binance.

Binance is already one of the largest crypto exchanges on Earth and they are moving aggressively to expand their reach in mining as well.

Binance mines about 11% of all blocks

6. BTC.com

BTC.com is a public mining pool that can be joined and mines 11% of all block. We strongly recommend joining Slush Pool or Poolin instead.

7. Huobi.pool

Huobi.pool is a Chinese based mining pool accounting for 5% of all mining.

8. Foundry USA

Foundry USA is (you guessed it) a US based pool owned by German blockchain company Foundry Digital. They account for 3% of all hashing power.

9. Slush

Slush Pool was the first mining pool and currently mines about 3% of all blocks.

Slush is probably one of the best and most popular mining pools despite not being one of the largest.

10. 1THash

This is a Chinese pool made from two pools: 1THash and 58coin. They mine about 3% of the blocks.

Quick Tip

Mining is not the fastest way to get bitcoins.

Buying bitcoin with a debit card is the fastest way. We highly recommending using Skrill whenever possible.

The comparison chart above is just a quick reference. The location of a pool does not matter all that much. Most of the pools have servers in every country so even if the mining pool is based in China, you could connect to a server in the US, for example.

Bitcoin Mining Pool Comparison

Pool	Fees	Payout
	Antpool	1.5-4%	PPLNS and PPS
	Slushpool	2%	Score
	F2 Pool	2.5%	PPS+
	Poolin	2.5%	PPS+

Get a Bitcoin Wallet and Mining Software

Before you join a mining pool you will also need Bitcoin mining software and a Bitcoin wallet. You will also very likely need an ASIC miner, since GPU mining will likely never be profitable again going forward.

Mining Pools vs Cloud Mining

Many people read about mining pools and think it is just a group that pays out free bitcoins. This is not true! Mining pools are for people who have mining hardware to split profits.

Many people get mining pools confused with cloud mining. Cloud mining is where you pay a service provider to mine for you and you get the rewards.

Just Want Bitcoins?

If you just want bitcoins, mining is NOT the best way to obtain coins.

Buying bitcoins is the EASIEST and FASTEST way to purchase bitcoins.

Get $10 worth of free bitcoins when you buy $100 or more at Coinbase.

Which Countries Mine the most Bitcoins?

Bitcoin mining tends to gravitate towards countries with cheap electricity.

As Bitcoin mining is somewhat centralized, 10-15 mining companies have claimed the vast majority of network hash power.

With many of these companies in the same country, only a number of countries mine and export a significant amount of bitcoins.

QUICK TIP

Unless you have access to very cheap electricity, and modern mining hardware then mining isn’t the most efficient way to stack sats. Buying bitcoin with a debit card is the simplest way, but we also recommend using a payment network like Skrill or Interac e-Transfer or use a bank transfer such as SEPA when available.

To buy bitcoin in your country or state, check our guides! A few of our most popular are listed below!

…or visit our exchange finder if your country is not listed above.

China

China mines the most bitcoins and therefore ends up “exporting” the most bitcoins.

Electricity in China is very cheap and has allowed Chinese Bitcoin miners to gain a very large percentage of Bitcoin’s hash power.

It’s rumored that some Chinese power companies point their excess energy towards Bitcoin mining facilities so that no energy goes to waste.

China is home to many of the top Bitcoin mining companies:

It’s estimated that these mining pools own somewhere around 60% of Bitcoins hash power, meaning they mine about 60% of all new bitcoins.

Georgia

Georgia is home to BitFury, one of the largest producers of Bitcoin mining hardware and chips. BitFury currently mines about 15% of all bitcoins.

Other Countries

The countries above mine about 80% of all bitcoins.

The rest of the hash power is spread across the rest of the world, often pointed at smaller mining pools like Slush (Czech Republic) and Eligius (US).

A Note on Pools

While we can see which mining pools are the largest, it’s important to understand that the hash power pointed towards a mining pool isn’t necessarily owned by the mining pool itself.

There are a few cases, like with BitFury and KnCMiner, where the company itself runs the mining operation but doesn’t run a mining pool.

Bitcoin miners can switch mining pools easily by routing their hash power to a different pool, so the market share of pools is constantly changing.

To make the list of top 10 miners, we looked at blocks found over the past 6 months using data from BlockTrail.com.

The size of mining pools is constantly changing. We will do our best to keep this post up-to-date.

If you cloud mine then you don’t need to select a pool; the cloud mining company does this automatically.

Why are Miners Important?

Bitcoin miners are crucial to Bitcoin and its security. Without miners, Bitcoin would be vulnerable and easy to attack.

Most Bitcoin users don’t mine.

However, miners are responsible for the creation of all new bitcoins and a fascinating part of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Mining, once done on the average home computer, is now mostly done in large, specialized warehouses with massive amounts of mining hardware.

These warehouses usually direct their hashing power towards mining pools.

Payout Schemes

How do Pools Pay Members?

You may be wondering how pools payout their members?

Is it the same way every time?

Do all pools use a similar payment structure or are all of them unique?

When you become a member of a mining pool, there are a number of ways your rewards for contributing hashing power can be calculated. All of the payout methods use the term “share”.

Quick Tip

Don’t forget to think about your tax obligation on the coins you buy or mine. There are some great tax software suites to make it easy! For instance, we have a great guide on how that software works to pay taxes on Coinbase buys.

A «share» is awarded to members of the mining pool who present a valid partial proof-of-work.

Essentially, the more hashing power you contribute to the pool, the more shares you are entitled to.

Pay Per Share

The most simple payout scheme, Pay Per Share guarantees the miner a payout regardless of if the pool finds the next block or not. The value of a share is determined by the amount of hashing power that is likely needed to find a block divided by the reward for finding it.

If 100 shares are likely needed to find a block and the reward is 6.25 BTC, then each share is worth .0625 BTC (6.25 / 100).

Payment is paid from the pool’s existing balance and the amount of the payment is determined based on your number of shares.

Because payment is guaranteed, more of the risk is on the mining pool operator. The payouts to the pool members is therefore smaller than in Pay Per Last N Share, explained below.

One final feature of Pay Per Share is that transaction fees from each block are kept by the pool operator. Pool members are only paid based on block rewards.

Full Pay Per Share

Full Pay Per Share (also known as “Pay Per Share +”) is the same as Pay Per Share, except transaction fees are also paid to the pool members on top of the block reward.

Pay Per Last N Shares

Pay Per Last N Shares is a more complicated payout that shifts more risk to pool members but also more rewards.

In Pay Per Last N Shares, pool members are only paid once a block has been found. Once a block is found, the pool looks at your share contributions for all previous blocks where the pool did not find the block, and this is called a “time window”. All the blocks in a time window are known as a “round”. Using these numbers, the pool determines your total share contributions over the round to determine your payout.

For example, if the pool mines through 6 blocks before finding a block, Then their reward for all the hashing power the pool contributed to the network over they 6 block round is 6.25 Bitcoins (not including transaction fees). If you contributed 100 shares for each of those blocks and the total number of shares was 1000, then your payment would be .625 BTC or .104 BTC per block.

The idea behind this payout scheme is that it removes all luck and only pays members based on their contribution to actual revenue earned by the pool. This scheme also incentivizes members to continue mining on in the pool even as the profitability of mining different coins rises comparatively. This is because disconnecting from the pool before a block is found will pay you nothing.

Pools that use Pay Per Last N Share may or may not include transaction fees in their reward payouts so it is up to your to find this out from each pool.

Quick Tip

Mining is not the fastest way to buy Bitcoin.

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