ViaBTC

A mining pool combines the hashrate of many miners so they get small, regular payouts instead of waiting years for a whole block.

A payout scheme is how a mining pool shares block rewards among its miners. The main question is who carries the luck: the pool (steady pay, higher fee) or the miners (variable pay, lower fee).

Stratum V2 is the newer protocol between miners and pools. It encrypts the connection, uses compact binary messages and, optionally, lets the miner rather than the pool choose which transactions go into a block.

Hashrate is how many guesses per second all Bitcoin miners make together. More hashrate means more energy protecting the network.