- Goal : Pool participants all attempt to mine a block with the same coinbase recipient
- Send money to key owned by pool manager
- Distribute revenues to members based on how much work they have performed
- Minus a cut for pool manager
Pool Variations
- Pay per share : flat reward per share
- Minus a significant fee
- Can’t trust miners
- Proportional : Since last block
- Lower risk for pool manager
- More work to verify
- “Luke-Jr” Approach : No management fee
- Miners only get paid out in whole BTC
- Pool owner keeps spread
Pool Protocols
- API for fetching blocks, submitting shares
- Stratum
- Getwork
- Getblocktemplate
- Proposed for standardization with a BIP
- Increasingly important; some hardware support