Author: Raúl Martínez 2014-06-17 19:01:00
Published on: 2014-06-17T19:01:00+00:00
The discussion revolves around the recent news of Ghash pool controlling 51% of the hashrate, which some consider a threat. The proposal suggests that miners should join a pool as independent miners and not slave miners, leading to the development of a new mining protocol that does not rely on the pool sending a list of transactions to include in a block. Each individual miner would collect transactions by themselves, either by running a full node or by running an SPV like node that asks other nodes for transactions. Once developed, the community could recommend all pools to use it. Pool owners would send instructions using this protocol to the miner about how many transactions to include per block and some info about the Coinbase field in the block. It is suggested that such a protocol can prevent some of the possible 51% attacks, including selfish mining, double spending or reverse transactions, deciding which transactions to include, and avoiding other pools from mining blocks. The only thing a 51% pool owner can do is shut down their pool and drop the hashrate by 51% because they do not control the miners. However, if the pool owner owns all the hardware in the pool, the proposal is not valid, and if the pool clients do not use this protocol, the proposal is not valid. The discussion also includes opinions on the Getblocktemplate protocol and the pooling-centralization problems it solves. While some believe there is no need to create anything new when GBT already exists, others highlight that it is opt-in and some pools do not support it. Moreover, most miners do not care and do not want to run full nodes, making it more work and resources than just pointing hash power at a stratum server. Additionally, it is believed that stratum mining protocol improves some performance things that GBT lacks. Finally, a new protocol that requires blocks created by miners is suggested and named in a cool way. Miners could ask for protocol support from their favourite pool.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T00:16:27.208632+00:00