By Bitcoin Tidskrift - 5 månader sedan - Läsningstid: 22 minuter
Blir gruvpooler ett problem?
Bitcoin miners provide a valuable service to the ecosystem. In exchange for the work they do securing the network, they are rewarded by the same network they protect. This sound and elegant design by Satoshi is surely one of the most remarkable aspects of Bitcoin.
Vad som dock alltmer glöms bort är att gruvdrift finns mer än bara hash.
A person engaging in the entire process must run a node to get reliably updated on the most recent state of the blockchain, then begin construction of a new block. This involves verifying the validity of the previous block, discovering unconfirmed transactions and usually selecting the most lucrative of them, constructing a generation transaction in which they pay themselves, building multiple merkle trees of these transactions, and finally hashing to actually solve this block. The transactions within the block template will constantly change as new ones get broadcasted to the network and when a new block is found by someone else, the miner must switch to building on top of that along with dumping all the transactions now already in the blockchain to populate a new template.
Gaffelaktiveringar
As you can see, hashing to actually solve the block is just one part of this process. A Bitcoin mining ASIC is also only capable of hashing. In the current environment, all other aspects of mining are generally delegated to mining pools. This has spawned some confusion. For example, in any circumstance where there is a discussion about activation of soft forks via version bit flipping within block templates, people will refer to this process being a MASF – “Miner Activated Soft Fork'' – and someone will always have to clarify that this responsibility falls solely to pools and that pools are not miners. They may also point out that miners are still ultimately in charge as if they desire the upgrade and the pool they are mining with doesn’t, they can simply switch pools. [For clarity, in the rest of this article I will refer to those only participating in hashing and leaving all other aspects of mining to pools as “hashers”.]
Back to soft forks - in the current environment where >99% of blocks are constructed by the same dozen entities, it becomes more accurate to call these “Pool Activated Soft Forks” which no one does, contributing to a dangerous illusion: that mining can be considered decentralized merely due to distribution of hashrate. This claim is simply not credible when all the hashrate is beholden to a tiny group of pools and thus the contents of Bitcoin’s blockchain going forward ultimately will not include anything these few entities consider unacceptable, as well as a whole host of other issues.
By not engaging in any other aspect of mining beyond hashing blocks constructed by pools, Bitcoin miners have largely abdicated a critical component of their role. The fact that this is not only possible but also the path of least resistance indicates that we have a systemic issue.
Pooler Och Blockspace-marknader
The implications of merely hashing and having a pool do everything else stretch far beyond soft fork activation. For example, miners presently are entirely unaware of what blocks will look like once solved, meaning that a miner performs work while blindly trusting that the block contains only desirable transactions. But you have a blatant violation of that trust in blocks such as denna – this is the famous block that kicked off the “ordinals” craze. Notice how the transaction fees the miners who worked on this block would actually enjoy amount to a measly ~$200 in BTC, in contrast to the blocks either side of it both averaging ~$5,000 in BTC.
Block space is valuable – that’s part of what makes Bitcoin work in the long term – but in a world where just a handful of players can have a template they construct end up in the blockchain, those same entities have near-exclusivity to sell this space and be paid out of band in exchange for it. Are they obligated – or even likely – to be forthright with their miners that they are doing this? Certainly not in this case as the intention was to surprise everyone. Going forward will they forward on to their hashers payments they receive for selling blockspace out of band?
Simply put, while the incentives for a pool and its hashers typically align with regard to maximizing profit, a pool has the option of selling blockspace for things other than regular Bitcoin transactions, while a miner’s income is more limited unless the pool chooses to be transparent and agrees to share revenue. Even if they do, verification requires the pool’s permission as opposed to verifying money earned from subsidy and transaction fees (also tricky with FPPS pools, more on that later).
Further implications of pools being Bitcoin’s centralized constructors of block templates stem from the fact that - on a more fundamental level, there are twelve “super nodes” with their own “super mempools”.
This cascades into people dealing directly with pools and ignoring mempools altogether. Some contend that the mempool is doomed regardless - and that the current state of centralized template construction is merely accelerating this, but it’s certainly not desirable in any case and it would be overly pessimistic to make this assumption in a world where genuinely decentralized template construction is somehow made realistic. Then out-of-band payments must make their way to a larger group of people if whoever is purchasing the block space wishes to make it into the chain in the same time frame. This would likely be more transparent and reminiscent of the way things currently work. Conversely, “super nodes” would hopefully be broken up into smaller pieces and thus no longer be able to offer the same guarantees.
För att avvika från denna aspekt av gruvdrift, låt oss flytta fokus till hur utbetalningar hanteras för närvarande.
Poolutbetalningsmodeller
Nearly all pools pay their hashers via FPPS (Full Pay Per Share) or something similar. One exception is ViaBTC offers PPLNS (Pay Per Last N Shares) in addition to FPPS. Antpool also offers PPLNS but hashers must forfeit all transaction fee revenue - this speaks to the point that I will soon endeavor to make - essentially that FPPS is not a model that works well in a world where transaction fee revenue is what is of relevance rather than subsidy. It should be mentioned that Braiins pool (formerly Slushpool) uses a system referred to as “score” which in practice is quite similar to PPLNS.
Vad är anledningen till denna överväldigande preferens för FPPS? Ur hasherns perspektiv får de betalt oavsett vad som händer på blockkedjan. Detta är kongruent med syftet med pooled gruvdrift – större konsekvens i inkomsten. FPPS erbjuder mer konsekventa utbetalningar eftersom poolen betalar baserat på beräknade intäkter och gör upp med blockkedjan oberoende.
Detta gör livet extremt enkelt för gruvarbetare som vill minimera problem till följd av störningar i kassaflödet, men det finns naturligtvis nackdelar – stora som jag hoppas lyfta fram här.
FPPS first and foremost requires that the pool become the custodian of all freshly mined bitcoins. These cannot be forwarded on to miners for a minimum of 100 blocks as freshly mined bitcoins are unspendable until after this and in practice, the mined coins can have nothing to do with what the miners are ultimately receiving when making withdrawals from the pool. The risks of third party custody should be obvious to almost everyone reading this article so I’ll skip it and move on to other issues with FPPS.
Nästa oro kommer från det faktum att en FPPS-pool mer generellt är en betydande mellanhand mellan hashs och själva nätverket. Vi har redan konstaterat att hashers inte är insatta i hur blocken de arbetar med i slutändan kommer att se ut förrän efter att de är lösta. FPPS gör att de nu inte heller är oroliga för om block ens hittas eller inte, det är poolens problem. Om vi ignorerar den ökade förutsägbarheten av utbetalningar (om en pool aldrig skulle besluta sig för att tappa sina hashers) måste vi erkänna kompromisserna med att göra detta.
Miners getting paid directly by Bitcoin itself – possible in alternative schemes like PPLNS or of course solo mining – can expect to be fully rewarded for their contributions including transaction fees. An FPPS pool can only do this as a post-hoc calculation because there is simply no way to predict what fees will amount to when establishing what hashers actually receive per share. A pool cannot simply assume that fees will be some value greater than 0 and credit miners with this as they mine because should fees drop below this value, they would simply be paying the miners out of their own pocket. They must periodically divide up fees and attribute them to miners once actually in the pool’s custody.
From the hasher’s perspective, complete trust in the pool is required since verification is next to impossible without the pool’s full transparency and cooperation. Previously, as alluded to above, this was less of an issue since most mining revenue came from subsidy with only a sprinkling of sats in transaction fees – but this increasingly isn’t (and indeed cannot be) the future of Bitcoin mining. Going forward, miners will earn primarily from transaction fees and those are simply harder to predict and monitor when using a pool than the subsidy.
Contrasted with a payout scheme like PPLNS where hashers accept increased variability (the pool’s luck becomes the hasher’s luck too), we see that the mining ecosystem has overwhelmingly elected to prioritize consistency of payouts over the ability to verify what is received. More perversely, some hashers actually prefer this — wishing to present themselves to governmental authorities as a kind of “hashing service” entirely disconnected from Bitcoin–some proudly so. This is because FPPS is such a radical deviation from the ideal miner/pool dynamic that it’s once again hard to describe what the hasher is even doing as “bitcoin mining”.
In effect, the FPPS pool is a large solo miner paying hashers to solve its blocks. After which they have an internal and opaque process by which they figure out what to pay their hashers. To really illustrate the point the hasher could (and in some not-so-hard to imagine scenarios would) even be paid its fees in something other than Bitcoin.
Why not? If you don’t care if any blocks get found let alone what they look like before construction, why not just get paid fiat by a solo miner to point your ASICs at them in whatever the most convenient currency is? Bitcoin is not always the most frictionless option, but even if it were, it’s reasonable to imagine continuing down a path where “hashing” may be performed by as many entities as you like, but all done on behalf of a tiny group of “pools” whose permission the entire network needs to get anything into the actual blockchain.
Vem hashar egentligen?
Let’s look at this in a wider context. We have already mentioned that some larger players wish to distance themselves from Bitcoin as far as possible, thus happily delegating as much Bitcoin related activity to their pool as possible. The pools are wide open to regulation, and a large amount of their hashrate is only too happy about it.
Detta introducerar återigen ekonomisk irrationalitet ur själva nätverkets perspektiv, vilket manifesterar sig i beteende som brytning av block som uppfyller vissa godtyckliga standarder. När detta inträffade tidigare, varade det inte länge på grund av motreaktioner från samhället och det absurda i att aggressivt försöka blidka en jurisdiktions skiftande regelsystem utan att ens bli ombedd att göra det. Men det faktum att det var ett alternativ förråder risken med centraliserad konstruktion av blockmallar. Kommer gruvarbetare i en jurisdiktion att försöka förbjuda eller vägra att behandla transaktioner som härrör från en annan? Kommer gruvarbetare helt enkelt vara en förlängning av en regering eller inflytelserik dålig aktör? Det finns konkreta exempel på pooler som sjunkit transaktionsavgifter för att tjäna utanför bandet, ibland helt enkelt för att följa regleringstrycket. Detta framstår återigen ekonomiskt irrationellt ur nätverkets perspektiv.
The most extreme recent example of this was the 19 BTC transaction fee paid in a transaction in a block ultimately found by F2Pool, ostensibly in error. As a FPPS pool, they became the custodian of the 19 BTC mining fee and chose to give it back to the person who made the mistake. This demonstrates perfectly the price of placing too large an intermediary between your miner and the Bitcoin network. In a PPLNS pool this would be less likely to have happened. Not because PPLNS pools are necessarily trustless or non-custodial, but by virtue of it being possible to monitor and verify fee revenue at the exact moment blocks come in, this would possibly have been harder for the pool to attempt having likely already credited miner’s accounts internally with their share of the mined funds causing greater backlash. Although nothing is in principle different until you contrast what would have happened should a pool make payouts to its miners in the coinbase/generation transaction itself. In that scenario the money would have already been in the miner’s custody and interception of fee revenue by the pool would have been impossible. So in this example a pool’s desire to seem generous or fair cost its miners $500,000 in fee revenue making a decision on behalf of them it should not have been in a position to make.
Nästa nummer: 51% och andra attacker
Detta borde vara enkelt att förklara: vid det här laget vet alla vad en attack på 51 % är. Vad som dock är mycket mindre förstått är att (fram tills nätverket går runt det) 51 % är kravet för att denna typ av attack ska vara en garanterad och evig framgång snarare än bara störande.
I verkligheten kan alla enheter som har mer än 20 % av nätverket orsaka problem via en mängd attacker, några utförs i det vilda och diskuteras bara sällan, vilket jag kommer in på senare. Men innan vi gör det kan vi stirra förskräckta på nätverket som har två ynkliga enheter med ett kombinerat hashrate på ett tillförlitligt sätt större än 51 %. Ännu värre, en av de största poolerna döljer inte så noga att den är ansvarig för ytterligare 10 % av blocken som hittas genom ytterligare en stor pool som moderbolaget har ett strategiskt partnerskap med. Det faktum att denna pantomime består inger inte förtroende.
There are two usual responses to this. Firstly, people point out that hashers can simply vote with their feet and switch pools if they ever combined forces to 51% attack. Secondly, that any pool would be insane to attempt it for the simple reason that disrupting bitcoin would cause the price to fall and no one invested in the ecosystem would ever want that. The second argument ignores human history and further assumes that people can never be coerced into behaving destructively and thus causing disruption simply for disruption’s sake or other nefarious purposes. (It also doesn’t take into account the fact that the market is often not necessarily a good indicator that there are issues with Bitcoin, see the forkwars of 2017.)
Det första argumentet gör dock ett mer solidt antagande att hashers alltid skulle byta i ett scenario där en pool verkligen blir för stor. Faktum är att om pooler försökte göra detta skulle verkligheten slå in och vi skulle inse att trots att vi konstruerade 99 % av våra blockmallar så är pooler faktiskt inte gruvarbetare. Vi har också en fallstudie av Ghash.io som känd som dödsspiral efter att ha skrämt alla genom att överskrida 40 %.
Bra, så vi har visat att detta egentligen inte är ett problem, hashers kan lita på för att bara hoppa till en annan pool. (I verkligheten, om stora gruvverksamheter är bundna till byråkrati är det ett mycket mindre tillförlitligt antagande, men låt oss åtminstone fortsätta som om vi är ganska övertygade om att denna attack inte är trolig.)
Unfortunately, awareness of the fact that hash power will migrate away from any pool that exceeds a scary threshold leads to them self-regulating - but not in a way that helps because they do not need to genuinely maintain a hashrate below a threshold, they simply need to make it visas på det sättet. Detta innebär i huvudsak att acceptera all hashkraft de kan få medan de skickar den vidare till andra pooler efter behov för att undvika att uppmärksamma världen på deras förmåga att orsaka förödelse.
So this leaves us with an unknowable picture of the network. 30% of blocks can be overtly found by the largest pool and be acceptable to everyone, while a further 10% of total network hashrate is still pointed at that pool and just secretly being directed to one or multiple smaller pools. The hashers responsible for that 10% are unlikely to realize it’s being used this way (and it gets even harder to detect with stratumV2 - more on this later).
Detta redan mindre än idealiska scenario blir mycket värre när du tar med i beräkningen det faktum att detta omdirigerade hashrate kan användas för att skada mindre pooler via blocknedhållande attacken.
This is as follows - the attacker engages in the mining process mostly as a normal user of the victim pool. As a result, they get a share of the reward from any block the pool finds as expected. The rewards then ultimately end up with the attacker who can then pay the actual hasher without having to lose any money. So far the only harm caused is the incorrect impression of the pool’s hashrate as being smaller than it actually is but the smaller pool remains unharmed.
Now the harm occurs if they decide to not tell the victim pool when they find a block. This has the effect of making the victim pool appear unlucky. They appear to simply be finding fewer blocks than they should be and are paying out a reward split among more participants than are actually honestly mining - i.e necessarily running at a loss assuming they don’t make up the losses some other way.
Om en FPPS-pool attackeras på det här sättet måste de förbränna intäkter från att betala gruvarbetare för att kompensera för skillnaden. Om de är PPLNS undrar deras gruvarbetare varför de inte får vad de ska få. Hur som helst är blockeringsinnehållning konkurrensbegränsande och kan förstöra offerpoolen genom att ge den ett dåligt rykte.
Ur attackpoolens perspektiv, låt oss säga att de utgör 5% av offerpoolens hashrate. Det betyder att de fortfarande står för 95 % av de förväntade intäkterna och poolen ser 5 % mindre lycklig ut än förväntat. Detta räcker lätt för att döda poolen, medan förlusten på 5 % på det omdirigerade hashratet kommer att vara av mycket mindre betydelse för den större poolen. Om den bara representerar 1 % av den större poolens totala hashkraft förlorar angriparen bara 5 % av 1 % av sina förväntade belöningar – 0.05 %. Detta är en fördel för alla skadliga gruvpooler av betydande storlek som bara är beredda att agera oetiskt.
The smaller the pool, the more vulnerable they are to this attack. The larger the pool, the more likely they are to block withhold a competing, smaller pool. This risk increases as large pools approach levels where their total hashrate begins to scare the community, which further motivates them to at least stash hashrate in smaller pools, even if they don’t actually attack with it or execute attacks infrequently enough for the problems to ultimately get dismissed as variance. Indeed - decreased variability is already enjoyed by larger pools due to more consistent payouts from the network which translates into being able to operate within tighter margins and thus be in a position to charge their hashers less. From the perspective of every miner/pool that isn’t under attack this attack means that they will enjoy lower difficulty as the Bitcoin network adjusts for there being fewer overall blocks.
Is block withholding merely theoretical? Absolutely not. Several mining pools were attacked in this exact way even as early as 2015. It is extremely difficult to thwart as a pool must monitor all workers and make a calculated decision to kick them off the pool and/or withhold payments to them should they be unlucky to a point of statistical impossibility and the pool able to reasonably assume they are acting maliciously. Attacks of this nature also incentivize pools to want to “know their hasher'' and custody payments which of course makes life harder for those wishing to mine permissionlessly.
Oavsett vilket är den övergripande effekten av allt detta att människor kommer att föredra gruvdrift med större pooler av ytterligare en anledning.
Vi har offentligt sett uttalanden från stora gruvarbetare som förklarar att de byter bort från mindre pooler på grund av att de får betalningar som inte motsvarade förväntningarna.
This is extremely undesirable as larger pools and the larger hashers that use them are more easily encumbered with regulatory burden and thus prone to engaging in behavior that damages Bitcoin, going beyond even centralization of block templates and temporary custodianship of all block rewards.
Poolerna blir i praktiken ställföreträdare, och upprätthåller byråkratisk nonsens på "vägnar" av sina hashers. De två största poolerna kräver för närvarande att deras användare hoppar igenom massor av ringar, inklusive identitetsavslöjande processer that should not and must not become necessary for someone to be able to mine bitcoin outside of solo mining.
To make one final point on block withholding beyond it threatening to make life harder for smaller pools and anyone wishing to hash with them, I say to anyone who might still be tempted to dismiss it as purely theoretical (even though its demonstrably happened in the past) - do we think it’s normal for pools to remain a consistent and apparently tolerable size organically? This would imply new hashrate coming online always somehow managing to distribute itself at least somewhat evenly. We must believe a pool can spring into existence, grow prodigiously and then just….stop….at right around the threshold needed before people get spooked. Do we see pools begging people to stop mining with them or straight up limiting account creation and kicking miners offline that exceed a permitted hashrate within existing accounts? We of course do not.
The two more probable scenarios are that either hashers are collectively self-regulating (unlikely, as mining with smaller pools now famously means earning less bitcoin even if the reasons I’ve presented in this article don’t entirely account for why - not to mention that examples of mass exodus from a pool were extremely noticeable the few times they have happened) - or - pools are simply misrepresenting the amount of hashrate they have pointed at them.
För att lägga till allt detta har mindre pooler ännu ett problem: de kan gå dagar utan att hitta block. En större pool räcker inte längre än några timmar. Det här är en upplösningsfråga – ju högre hashrate du har, desto närmare förväntningarna är du på kort sikt, och detta resulterar tyvärr i en minimitröskel under vilken en pool inte kan förvänta sig att kompensera för perioder av otur, då den bara blir omöjligt att konkurrera.
The two-week periods between difficulty epochs means a reasonable number of blocks must be found within that two-week period so that any bad luck has a shot at being balanced out by subsequent good luck. If not, if - for example - the pool has a projected block rate of 1 block every 13 days and doesn’t find a block before the difficulty adjusts upwards causing them to drop to a projection of 1 in every 15 days, that prior window has closed forever. If it’s a PPLNS pool, the hashers have earned less than they otherwise might have. If it’s an FPPS pool, the pool has burnt a lot of cash and/or become bankrupt.
This means there are only so many pools that can exist, at least ones that operate the way today’s pools operate. There simply cannot be hundreds, because many of them would keep collapsing in periods of bad luck due to having less than 1% of the network hashrate and therefore potentially not even being able to reliably find one block per day, encountering potential periods of weeks without blocks. This is a limitation placed on us by Bitcoin själv.
Hur kommunicerar gruvarbetare och pooler?
The protocol by which miners and pools communicate is Stratum (slowly but surely being superseded by StratumV2). StratumV1 is both ancient and deeply flawed. Firstly, all communication is done in plaintext. This means ISPs are not only privy to the fact that you’re mining but also the scale to which you are doing so, and they - along with anyone else that can snoop traffic on your network - can perform MITM attacks resulting in you using your machines and power on someone else’s behalf. This has been abused before by unknown attackers to hijack hashrate away from the intended pools.
Bortsett från ett antal ineffektiviteter, misslyckas StratumV1 inte heller med att erbjuda gruvarbetare ett praktiskt sätt att konstruera sina egna blockmallar och fortfarande njuta av gruvdrift i en pool. Alla dessa problem åtgärdas med den extremt önskvärda StratumV2 (ursprungligen "GBT", sedan "Better Hash") som vi återkommer till senare.
Hårdvara/firmware
Before getting to the solutions, we’ll deviate from discussing pool/miner dynamics - as this article would be incomplete if we failed to bring up the fact that there are only two companies manufacturing ASICs at any meaningful scale - Bitmain and MicroBT. There are others, but realistically almost all hashing is occurring on machines manufactured by those two companies.
Detta är inte bra av uppenbara skäl och härrör i huvudsak från det faktum att chiptillverkning är extremt svår att göra och därmed hypercentraliserad.
It’s outside the scope of this article to go into solutions here, but there are folks working on making home mining something far more practical (in North America the main issue being the requirement for 220-240v and dealing with the obnoxious noise). The contention among those working on these pleb-mining projects being that if it becomes doable for enough every-day bitcoin, they can start to represent a significant percentage of the total hashrate of the network, which is preferable to most mining operations operating at a scale where they are wide open to regulatory interference.
Denna uppgift försvåras mycket av det faktum att den fasta programvaran är sluten källkod. Även anpassad firmware som kan "jailbreaka" en ASIC tenderar att vara stängd källa för att säkerställa att de som använder den betalar utvecklingsavgifter (dvs kostnaden för din fantastiska eftermarknadsfirmware bryts på uppdrag av teamet som tillverkar firmwaren.)
The stock firmware on ASICs - particularly Bitmain’s - is a great indication of how comfortable they have become with their dominance of the market. Beyond being closed source, it’s clearly malicious. You are forced to mine on their behalf upon powering up an Antminer – though a miner can at least prevent this from happening by blocking the connection (or installing aftermarket firmware, but then you pay dev fees instead and those can’t be blocked without the miner refusing to mine at all.) Bitmain has also been caught several times adding malicious backdoors to the firmware for their miners (see Antbleed), and actively works to lock out aftermarket firmware developers.
Det faktum att lagerfirmware gör detta är uppriktigt sagt upprörande och visar tydligt det trängande behovet av konkurrens inom ASIC-tillverkning.
Would anyone feel comfortable if the rules of the network were enforced by closed source bitcoin nodes? Further, imagine those nodes caused users to lose BTC to the developers of that software - and we all knew that was happening. Would anyone accept that? When it comes to mining, almost no regard is paid to the sovereignty of its participants. Of course node software and ASIC firmware are not of equivalent importance and we of course place more scrutiny on the former as we should, but the latter is not immaterial and is certainly being unacceptably neglected.
Med allt detta sagt, låt oss gå vidare till några av lösningarna och fokusera särskilt på att öka omfattningen av vad som är möjligt som gruvarbetare och förbättra befintliga modeller.
P2Pool
There is not much to say on this beside the fact that it decentralized basically every aspect of pooled mining. While this does many desirable things at a small scale, it requires that every user download, verify, and track the shares of every other user and prove to each other that they are accounting for everything correctly in their templates. Achieving this in an adversarial environment at any scale is essentially an impossible task. Due to the fundamental nature of pooled mining, far more resources are required than what is needed to run a Bitcoin full node, not to mention making things more complicated for the miner.
For these reasons it has been ignored by most, and used only by more technical users or idealists who - understandably - cannot bring themselves to mine with the alternatives.
StratumV2
Detta är definitivt den lägst hängande frukten. Den erbjuder praktiska lösningar för många av de problem som nämns i den här artikeln.
För det första, genom att tillåta krypterad kommunikation mellan pooler och hasher, kommer ISP:er och alla andra enheter med tillgång till din nätverkstrafik inte längre att bli trivialt medvetna om det faktum att du minar (eller i vilken utsträckning du gör det). Att "MITMING" dig till hash för en angripares räkning blir följaktligen också omöjligt, eller mycket mindre trivialt.
Secondly and perhaps most significantly, it’s also capable of allowing hashers to construct their own block templates, so while pools would remain trusted coordinators of reward splits, and likely still custodians of block rewards - this would nonetheless represent a shift in power away from pools towards miners and be unequivocally a good thing.
Lastly, there are a few other improvements that I encourage you to check out här..
A world in which StratumV2 is the norm, along with enthusiasm from miners to actually construct their own templates (ideally a pool would offer an incentive to miners who did this) would enjoy a far more resilient Bitcoin.
Gemenskapen är i huvudsak enad i arbetet för att uppgradera gruvdriftsekosystemet till StratumV2, men historiskt sett har gruvarbetare i allmänhet undvikit att använda dessa lösningar på grund av ytterligare ansträngningar (om än trivialt jämfört med p2pool) och inga incitament att göra det.
Runda upp
There is great room for improvement with or without StratumV2. What’s needed is a pool that offers miners the ability to take direct custody of their coins while mining. This requires that a pool (or its hashers) construct block templates in which miner’s rewards are paid out directly in the coinbase/generation transaction contained within every block. The fact that this is impractical under the FPPS system means any pool doing this would face reluctance from some miners, but those who switched would enjoy greater transparency as Bitcoin itself would - above some threshold - be paying them directly with an easy to verify split of subsidy and fee revenue. This can be coupled with pools - pre-stratumV2 - at least making miners aware of block templates constructed on their behalf prior to blocks being solved, and post-stratumV2 simply needing to verify that all miners are constructing templates that accurately reflect reward splits without the scaling implications of all miners having to do this continuously.
The pool can also address the reluctance of miners to make their own block templates by offering incentives for miners who do so, by - for example - charging them lower fees. It seems that if miners are unwilling to take on the burden of doing this even once it becomes practical again, then this additional incentive might become necessary.
Ovanstående förslag skulle förbättra saker och ting dramatiskt.
Många initiativ och tillkännagivanden kommer upp angående ASIC-tillverkning och poolinfrastruktur som förhoppningsvis bör vara välkommen utveckling för alla som är intresserade av att säkerställa gruvtrender mot större decentralisering.
Detta är ett gästpost av Bitcoin mekaniker. Åsikter som uttrycks är helt egna och återspeglar inte nödvändigtvis de från BTC Inc eller Bitcoin Tidskrift.
Ursprunglig källa: Bitcoin magazine