Hashpools - A new Kind of Mining Pool Powered @vnprc
Mining bitcoin has come to rely almost exclusively on incumbent mining pools serving as trusted third parties to produce block templates and process payouts. While the system works well enough for most miners, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely decentralized mining is not really possible, since mining pools cannot avoid bending the knee to the most well capitalized pool operator. The need for capital to smooth out mining reward variance increases pool centralization, limiting the minimum practical pool size and cutting off the possibility for small casual mining, and there is a broader cost in the loss of the ability to mine UTXOs that do not pass through custodial wallets. With the possibility of block withholding, the need for trust spreads. Mining pools must be wary of their hashers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud on the part of the mining pool cartel is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and privacy violations can be avoided by mining to a solo pool, but no mechanism exists to buy hashrate directly without a trusted party. In this talk, I propose a solution to the mining pool centralization problem using a self-hostable FOSS mining pool stack to generate ecash assets backed by mining shares. The system is robust as long as some honest pool operators, anywhere in the world, are able to host it without interference from the state.
This presentation was recorded in October 2024 in Berlin, Germany during bitcoin++ conference, ecash edition.
#btcplusplus #devconf #bitcoineducation #bitcoinconf #bitcoindev #bitcoinconference #cypherpunks
https://t.co/TGQTphef06
Meet my favorite new mining builder. This chad vibed Sv2 support into the bitaxe firmware. π₯
Straight c code. Zero tests.
LEGENDARY π
@OGBTC That's fine until your hashrate changes. This model was built for mining datacenters, a slowly dying usecase.
The future is local demand response, stranded energy mining, and the big daddy: hashrate heating. These use cases all produce variable hashrate. Vardiff is the future.
I encounter a lot of confusion about Sv2 from the open source mining community. I usually talk about encryption, efficiency, template submission. People's eyes glaze over and I lose them.
Let's back it up. Perhaps the most important property of Sv2 is that there is a spec. π§΅
Why is Sv2 better?
The definitive answer, upstream of other considerations: it provides an unambiguous comms protocol that everyone can implement. No more guessing games.
Guess and check is an extremely poor foundation for long term success in critical comms protocols.