Since bitcoin’s prominence is increasing, the number of miners joining the network is increasing as well making the process of mining even more complex. The primary reason of it is the increase of bitcoin miners which makes the level of difficulty higher also.
That’s why, even if a sophisticated software and hardware is readily available, individual miners will still have difficulty in solving the mathematical problems for the purpose of completing a block. And for sure it will be more difficult as the day goes by.
In line with this, mining individually is decreasing already and most miners are now inclined in a more susceptible and new form of mining which is called as Pool Mining.
Pool mining works by connecting miners around the world, making them able to work hand in hand for their common goal. In this way, the process of mining is trouble-free and easy. The miner’s pool can able to finish a particular task faster compared to an individual. Each pool miner is given a reward which primarily depends on the work input they have contributed.
Since the number of miners is increasing globally, the difficulty of bitcoin mining is so high presently that solo miners can’t possibly make profit. Additionally, solo mining requires so much time where all your effort gets wasted in the end.
So, as an alternative to spending a lot of hours fumbling through the computer’s keyboard while facing the screen, a better way to do is to join a miners pool wherein all miners work for the same objective dividing the task to crackup the complexity.
Entering a pool may be more of an advantage especially to newbies since it gives them a platform to be able to work in hand with experts which allows them to boost their skills in a short span of time.
Entering a pool of bitcoin or any pool of other cryptocurrency such as Litecoin, Ripple and Ethereum is just very simple. A lot of pooling websites all over the web are operating their own pools. These websites permits you to join their own respective pools.
What you need to do is just to enroll on a specific pool website for your own pool account. The process of enrollment is just as easy as like any other process of signing up you are maybe familiar with.
After you have made your own pool account, an important step you need to do is to “ create a worker”. After that, you can now start mining. Mostly in pools, a default name is assigned as well as a password athough you can change and customize it according to your own requirements.
By the time a pool spots a valid and complete block, you are given a reward depending on your own contribution. This manner of payoff system is impartial and not biased. Additionally, a number of many schemes for rewarding is also present for pool miners and these are listed below:
In each pool, every miner is awarded in advance a fixed BTC amount for his share. This payoff is given from the existing balance of the pool and cannot be withdrawn readily. Because of its null variance, this is suppose to be valuable only for the beginners.
According to its name, the form of rewards to the miners is basically according to their individual performance and scores. The level of variance is high perhaps in this scheme.
In this payoff scheme, a split of reward is done among the miners in the pool that basically depends on their submitted number of shares.
This scheme is just similar with Pay Per Share or PPS. What differs is that, every miner is awared the maximum amount possible for their own respective shares. The amount of payoff is dependent on the maximum pool balance available.
When segwit is activated, you will want to be able to mine and relay segwit-style blocks. The following mining software has been upgraded to support segwit.
Please note that software that supports the GetBlockTemplate (GBT) RPC must be upgraded to support the BIP9 and BIP145 changes to GBT. All the programs linked above that support GBT have been upgraded.
Segwit is already activated and enforced on testnet, so you may find it useful to test your infrastructure upgrade by mining with some small amount of hashrate on testnet. Alternatively, Bitcoin Core 0.13.1’s regression test mode (regtest) also supports segwit by default.