mining pool

A mining pool is a joint group of cryptocurrency miners who combine their computational resources over a network to strengthen the probability of finding a block or otherwise successfully mining for cryptocurrency.

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There are different shades of mining

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A miner can mine by oneself --> Though she would receive all the rewards without having to pay anyone else, the approach is usually impractical in reality for casual miners with a mining rig or two. The difficulty in popular blockchains like Ethereum has become so high that finding a block would take years.

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Joining a mining pool--> A miner could join a mining pool. By adding her hash power to the power of the group, When anyone in the pool finds a valid block, the reward is shared among the miners proportional to the work they have submitted.

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Joining a cloud mining -->Instead of owning the hardware required to mine herself (either individually or in a pool), the miner could rent time from existing miners who operate the hardware.