Over 50% of Bitcoin’s hashrate has, at times, been controlled by just two mining pools. Not miners. Pools.
For a lot of miners, the biggest risk isn’t hardware failure or electricity costs. It’s picking the wrong pool partner and slowly bleeding revenue without realizing it.
Most new miners chase the pool with the biggest hashrate, assuming bigger means safer payouts. But pool size only tells part of the story. Fee structures typically range from 1% to 3%, and payout models like PPS vs FPPS can change earnings noticeably over time. A miner contributing 100 TH/s to a pool with a 3% fee and weaker block luck could earn meaningfully less than the same setup in a 1% FPPS pool with steadier rewards. That difference compounds month after month while you’re mining
$BTC .
There’s also a centralization risk people ignore. When too much hashpower clusters in a few pools, the network becomes more vulnerable to coordination problems or censorship pressure. We’ve already seen periods where the top three pools controlled well over 60% of
$BTC hashrate. For miners, that concentration can also mean payout volatility if a large pool suddenly changes policy or infrastructure.
And this doesn’t just apply to
$BTC . Similar dynamics show up in other proof‑of‑work ecosystems like
$ETH before the merge, where a few dominant pools dictated reward stability.
If you were running mining hardware today, would you prioritize the biggest pool or the most transparent one?
#Bitcoin #CryptoMining #OnChain