2.16 Mining Pools vs Going Solo

A single home miner with one ASIC might statistically find a block once every several decades. That's a brutal lottery — you'd spend years paying electricity bills for nothing, then maybe hit a jackpot.

To smooth this out, miners join pools. Everyone in a pool combines their hashing power, the pool collectively wins blocks far more often, and the rewards are split proportionally to how much work each person contributed (minus a small fee).

The downside: a handful of pools end up controlling a big chunk of mining, which raises centralisation concerns. A newer protocol called Stratum V2 fixes part of this by letting individual miners choose which transactions go into their blocks, even while pooling rewards.

Solo mining has had a small revival too. Tiny 'lottery miner' devices for home use are popular — you'll almost certainly never win a block, but if you do, the entire reward is yours.