Author: Pieter Wuille 2013-08-19 20:14:36
Published on: 2013-08-19T20:14:36+00:00
In an email exchange from August 2013, Frank F expressed strong objections to the removal of getwork API, which he believed was the only mechanism that allowed anyone to say that bitcoin is a peer-to-peer (P2P) system in the truest sense of the word. He argued that removing this functionality would favour pool operators and private mining interests, leading to a monopoly/cartel model for bitcoin that would be tragic given its great promise. Frank F stated that nobody knows what mining will look like in the future, and denying novice miners the ability to mine at a small scale would not be a good path to start down.Pieter, who responded to Frank F's email, clarified that there were technical problems with getwork and they had been addressed and fixed in a successor API called getblocktemplate. This new API was even more decentralization-friendly as it allowed the caller to see what transactions the daemon was trying to put into a block and even modify it. Pieter suggested that the proposal was not to remove functionality but to remove an obsolete API.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T17:28:49.841585+00:00