<p>In Proof-of-Work (PoW) mining, a miner that contributes 10% of the network hash rate will on average receive 10% of the mining rewards. &quot;On average&quot; means that 10% of blocks are mined by this miner, and 90% of blocks are mined by other miners.</p>
<p>In practice, basically all miners join mining pools which removes this randomness, i.e., pools pay miners deterministically based on the hash rate they supply.</p>
<p>My question is: Why is randomness needed in the PoW protocol? Specifically, if a miner supplies 10% of the network hash rate, why cannot this miner simply receive 10% of the mining reward for each block?</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2022-08-14T08:33:03.323Z
How would you calculate what percentage of hash rate the miner supplies and who would do the calculation?
Mike D
CC BY-SA 4.0
2022-08-14T09:07:32.833Z
I see. The entire network would basically have to operate as a large mining pool, estimating the hash rate of miners based on "shares".
arni
CC BY-SA 4.0
2022-08-14T17:24:02.557Z
This is arguably what systems like p2pool used to do: it was its own lower-work blockchain system whose "blocks" were shares of a global, distributed mining pool, which then distributed winnings proportional to the shares. This works, but it doesn't avoid the need for randomness/variance - it just does so by substituting in another blockchain with more rapid blocks in order to compute the relative hashrate of each participant.
Pieter Wuille
<mining-theory><hash><mining-reward><proof-of-work>
Why is randomness needed in Proof-of-Work?
arni
# Why is randomness needed in Proof-of-Work?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2022-08-14)

In Proof-of-Work (PoW) mining, a miner that contributes 10% of the network hash rate will on average receive 10% of the mining rewards. "On average" means that 10% of blocks are mined by this miner, and 90% of blocks are mined by other miners.

In practice, basically all miners join mining pools which removes this randomness, i.e., pools pay miners deterministically based on the hash rate they supply.

My question is: Why is randomness needed in the PoW protocol? Specifically, if a miner supplies 10% of the network hash rate, why cannot this miner simply receive 10% of the mining reward for each block?

**Tags:** mining-theory, hash, mining-reward, proof-of-work

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: How would you calculate what percentage of hash rate the miner supplies and who would do the calculation?  
> **username_0**: I see. The entire network would basically have to operate as a large mining pool, estimating the hash rate of miners based on "shares".  
> **username_2**: This is arguably what systems like p2pool used to do: it was its own lower-work blockchain system whose "blocks" were shares of a global, distributed mining pool, which then distributed winnings proportional to the shares. This works, but it doesn't avoid the need for randomness/variance - it just does so by substituting in another blockchain with more rapid blocks in order to compute the relative hashrate of each participant.  

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