A single miner might wait years for a block. A mining pool combines many miners and splits rewards by work contributed, turning a lottery into a steady income.
How concentrated? (mempool.space, week to 23 Oct 2026)
- Foundry USA: 285 of 1,065 blocks (26.8%)
- AntPool: 19.6%
- F2Pool: 16.2%
- ViaBTC: 8.6%
- SpiderPool: 6.7%
The top two pools found 46.4% of blocks. Pool attribution is based on tags in blocks and is not perfect.
The concern
Today, the pool usually builds the block template. A few pool operators therefore decide which transactions go into most blocks, and could be pressured to censor.
How Bitcoin answers
- Hashrate can leave. Pools do not own the machines. If a pool misbehaves, miners can point their machines elsewhere by changing a setting.
- Nodes set the rules. A pool cannot make invalid blocks; every full node would reject them.
- Stratum V2 lets individual miners choose their own transactions, moving template power back to them.
- Censorship is costly. A transaction skipped by one pool can be mined by the next.