Like most other mineable coins, Gridcoin can be mined as part of a mining pool. This means that each individual miner contributes to the work done by the pool as a collective, and in turn the pool pays out individual miners for their contribution. As a result, miners can be paid for work without having to stake any blocks themselves - an occurance that may be very unlikely if the miner has a low balance or magnitude. There has been significant confusion on the Gridcoin IRC channel recently about pools not paying out users, or being inactive, so I hope to point potential pool miners in the right direction with this article.
In response to there not being any good, open source Gridcoin mining pools, the Gridcoin foundation put up a bounty of 100,000 GRC for the first developer to create and release an open source mining pool. This feat was achieved by Brian, aka 
As at the time of writing, GRCpool is the only actively developed and maintained pool serving the Gridcoin network. As such, I strongly suggest anyone pool mining for a different pool to switch their hosts over to mine for GRCpool. If you have any concerns or questions about the pool, the developer is very active on the Gridcoin Slackchat, which features its own GRCpool channel. There is further contact information available on the GRCpool website.
It is likely that in future more pools will appear and be actively developed, in which case this advice becomes outdated. As Steemit does not allow editing of articles over a week old, it is important that you do your own research after this point.
I would like to wrap up here by showing you the membership numbers for GRCpool over the course of roughly the last 6 months. This huge influx of Gridcoin miners, not captured in the CPID growth, is the reason the magnitude of miners has been dropping across the board. In fact, GRCpool now almost has a staggering 30,000 mag.
This is the easiest it will ever be to mine Gridcoin, and likely near the cheapest it will ever be to buy. If you have any questions, feel free to drop them below or pop into the Gridcoin Slackchat. If you would like to get started with Gridcoin pool mining, this 12 minute video will take you from a cold start to being fully set up:
Keep crunching!
If you would like to get further involved, or to read up on what is going on with the network, you can check out the following further channels serving the Gridcoin network:
Gridcoin Github Repo - Full source code and development discussions.
Gridcoin Developer Slack - Chat with the devs, as well as general channels for troubleshooting and branding discussions.
Gridcoin IRC - Join the linked channel, then register with NickServ using the instructions at the top of the page so you can join #Gridcoin. This is required to stop someone else stealing your nickname and the associated GRC.
Gridcoin Steemit - You are here already! =)
Gridcoin Homepage - The actively maintained and developed homepage of GRC globally.
Gridcoin Subreddit - Anything GRC related. The developers read the comments posted here, and will in all likelihood directly address any questions you pose within the day.
Gridcoin Forum and Main Thread - The ongoing megathread where you are most likely to find the original GRC developer Rob weighing in.
Gridcoin Twitter - Keep up to date with GRC news.
Image credit:
Banner, @joshoeah
