Your Pool Decides
How Much You Actually Earn

For a first-time miner, a large pool with an FPPS or PPS+ payout is the easiest start — income is steady and predictable, and the dashboards are beginner-friendly. Pools like F2Pool, ViaBTC and EMCD are common starting points because they support many coins and have clear setup guides.

Pool mining is the right choice for almost everyone. Solo mining only pays when your own machines find a block — with one or a few ASICs on a network like Bitcoin, that statistically takes years to decades, so most solo miners earn nothing. A pool merges your hashrate with thousands of others and pays you a proportional share of every block, turning the same hardware into steady daily income. Solo mining only makes sense at industrial scale or on very small networks where you control a meaningful share of the hashrate.

FPPS pays you a fixed amount per share plus a share of transaction fees, so your income is smooth and the pool absorbs bad-luck days. PPLNS pays based on the pool's actual recent luck — it can earn slightly more over the long run but swings up and down. FPPS is the safer choice if you want to forecast revenue.

Typical fees run from about 1% to 4% depending on the coin and payout model. PPLNS options are often cheaper (sometimes 0–2%) but carry more variance, while FPPS/PPS+ sit around 2–4% for the stability they provide. A slightly higher fee on a reliable, high-uptime pool usually beats a cheap pool with frequent downtime.

We rank pools per coin by fee, payout reliability, uptime, coin support and beginner-friendliness — the order you see in "Find your pool" reflects that. The links here are affiliate links: if you register through them the pool shares a small part of its own fee with us at no extra cost to you. You pay the exact same pool fee either way, and it keeps guides like this free.

The pool tracks the shares your machines submit and credits your account balance continuously. Once the balance reaches the payout threshold — for example 0.001 BTC on many Bitcoin pools — it is sent automatically to the wallet address you saved, usually once per day. FPPS pools pay that daily amount regardless of whether the pool found a block that day.

The large, established pools are — operations like F2Pool, Antpool and Braiins have paid out reliably for over a decade. The practical risks are using an unknown pool with no track record, or leaving large balances sitting on the pool. Keep it safe by choosing a pool with years of history, paying out to your own wallet, and setting a low payout threshold so the pool never holds much of your money.

It depends on the pool. Several major pools — including EMCD, Antpool and ViaBTC — let you mine without identity verification, while exchange-linked pools such as Binance Pool require a verified account. If privacy matters to you, choose a no-KYC pool and pay out to your own wallet.

The stratum URL is the address your ASIC uses to talk to the pool — it looks like stratum+tcp://btc.f2pool.com:3333. Every pool lists its stratum URLs per coin and region on its "connect" or "getting started" page. You paste it into the Pool 1 field of your miner's dashboard together with your worker name, and the machine starts submitting shares within minutes.

Luxor is our top pick for Kaspa: it runs first-class kHeavyHash support with North-American servers, transparent statistics and professional tooling. F2Pool and Antpool also mine KAS reliably if you prefer keeping every coin under one account. For Alephium the picture is similar — Luxor leads, NiceHash is the fallback.

Luck describes how a pool's actual block finds compare to statistical expectation — 100% is exactly on target, 120% is a lucky streak, 80% an unlucky one. Variance is how strongly that luck swings your income. On FPPS pools the operator absorbs the variance and your payout stays flat; on PPLNS pools your earnings follow the luck curve directly.

Yes, but less than most people think. A closer server means lower latency and fewer stale shares — typically a difference of well under 1%. Simply pick the pool's regional endpoint (EU, US or Asia) closest to your machines or hosting facility. Uptime and payout reliability matter far more than shaving a few milliseconds.

Yes, at any time and without cost. Pools have no contracts or lock-ins — switching is just replacing the stratum URL in your miner's dashboard with the new pool's address, which takes about five minutes. Any small unpaid balance on the old pool is still paid out once you cross its threshold, or on its scheduled settlement day.

You don't split one machine across pools simultaneously, but every miner lets you set backup pools (Pool 2 and Pool 3). If your primary pool goes offline, your ASIC automatically fails over to the next one — so you never lose mining time. Always configure at least one backup.

The pool itself does not change how much you earn — it makes your earnings predictable. Revenue depends on your hardware's hashrate and efficiency, the coin's price and network difficulty, and your electricity cost; the pool then takes its 1–4% fee. As a rough 2026 reference, a modern Bitcoin ASIC like the Antminer S21 earns in the single-digit dollars per day before power. Use a profit calculator with your own power price to get a real number.