Author: Goss, Brian C., M.D. 2013-08-19 20:22:27
Published on: 2013-08-19T20:22:27+00:00
The Bitcoin development mailing list was discussing the proposal to remove "getwork" RPC from Bitcoind. Jeff Garzik, the proposer, made this suggestion because most people on the mainnet use a pool rather than "getwork" directly to bitcoind. Those who solo mine use a pool server to communicate with bitcoind via "getblocktemplate" or other means. Tests show that attempts to solo mine on mainnet via "getwork" lead to delays and problems. On testnet, getwork has a better chance of continuing to work as open source pool servers or p2pool tools are available for testnet. The proposal received mixed reactions, with some suggesting that it would lock out individual novice miners while favoring only pool operators and private mining interests. Others pointed out that getblocktemplate does everything getwork did and more, making it just the removal of an obsolete API.The discussion in this email thread is centered around the idea of denying individual novice miners the ability to mine at a small scale, which could be seen as inefficient but not necessarily a bad path to take. Instead of removing functionality altogether, technical problems with getwork should be addressed and fixed. This was done in a successor API called getblocktemplate, which is even more decentralization-friendly as it allows the caller to see what transactions the daemon is trying to put into a block and modify if necessary.The email ends with a quote about the tyranny of money and an advertisement for Performance Central, a new site for efficient Application Performance Management resources.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T16:16:21.528470+00:00