One can imagine a mining pool as a farming cooperative. Farmers pool their production together to reduce the variance between supply and demand, thereby obtaining a more stable income for their operation. A mining pool operates in a similar manner, with the shared resource being hashes. Indeed, the discovery of a single valid hash enables the creation of a block and the receipt of the coinbase reward, currently 6.25 BTC plus the transaction fees included in the block.

If you mine alone, you will only be rewarded when you find a block. Being in competition against all other miners on the planet, you would have very little chance of winning this lottery, and you would still have to pay the fees associated with using your miner without any guarantee of success. Mining pools address this issue by pooling the computing power of several (thousands) of miners and sharing their rewards based on the percentage of participation in the pool's hashrate when a block is found. To visualize your chances of mining a block alone, you can use this tool. By entering the information for an Antminer S9, we can see that the chances of finding a hash that allows for the creation of a block are 1 in 24,777,849 for each block or 1 in 172,068 per day. On average (with a constant hashrate and difficulty), it would take at least 471 years to find a block (as difficulty increases).

However, since everything in Bitcoin is based on probability, it sometimes happens that solo miners are rewarded for taking this risk: Solo Bitcoin Miner Solves Block With Hash Rate of Just 10 TH/s, Beating Extremely Unlikely Odds – Decrypt

If you like to gamble, you can try it, but our guide will not focus on that direction. Instead, we will concentrate on the mining pool that best suits our needs for creating a heating system.

Considerations to have when choosing a mining pool include the pool's reward system, which can vary, as well as the minimum amount required to withdraw rewards to an address. For example, Braiins, which offers the software we are discussing here, also offers a pool. This pool features a reward system called "Score" that incentivizes miners to mine for extended periods of time. Participation includes an uptime factor expressed as a "scoring hashrate". In our case, where we want a heating system that can be turned on for only a few minutes, this is not the ideal reward system. We prefer a reward system that gives us an equal reward for each participation. Additionally, the minimum withdrawal amount for Braiins Pool is 100,000 sats, and it is on-chain. So we lose some sats in transaction fees, and a portion of our reward can be locked if we don't mine enough during the winter.

The reward model that interests us is PPS, which stands for "pay-per-share". This means that the miner will receive a reward for each valid share. There is also a variant of this system, FPPS (Full Pay Per Share), which not only divides the coinbase reward, but also the transaction fees included in the block. The mining pools we recommend for connecting your mining/heating are Linecoin Pool (FPPS) and Nicehash (PPS).

To configure a pool in Braiins OS+, you will need to create an account in one of the pools of your choice. Here we will take the example of Linecoin:

Once your account is created, click on Connect to Pool

Then copy the Stratum address and your username:

You can now go back to the Braiins OS+ interface to enter these credentials. For the password, you can leave the field empty.