Published on: 2014-06-19T21:07:17+00:00
The discussion revolves around the challenges faced by mining pools in validating transactions and ensuring that miners are using up-to-date software. It is noted that full validation of every submitted share is difficult and economically unfeasible for medium-sized pools. To address this, Mark Friedenbach suggests stochastically validating a randomly selected sample of shares as a solution to detect invalid blocks and protect against incorrect mining software.In an email conversation between Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn and Slush, founder of Slush Pool, they discuss the lack of decentralization in mining pools despite the availability of the getblocktemplate (GBT) protocol. The reason is attributed to implementation issues with software such as libblkmaker, which does not support miners connecting to their own node and choosing their own blocks. Slush proposes using Stratum + Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) validation on the miner side as an alternative, allowing miners to switch to fallback pools when necessary.Kevin questions why pools are being punished, to which the writer responds that it is part of a trend to criticize labor specialization. The writer mentions scrypt mining, PoS, and MaidSafe as examples of this trend. The message concludes with a reminder to support online privacy through email encryption.Sergio Lerner proposes a setting to prevent mining pools and reduce variance in payoffs. This involves increasing the block rate and changing the Bitcoin Proof-of-Work (PoW), while still allowing current ASICs to work. The proposed BlockPow concept aims to discourage mining pools by increasing bandwidth requirements for pool administrators. Solo miners without a pool can potentially earn more than pool miners if block fees account for a significant portion of the block reward. However, the proposed method requires infrastructure that utilizes getblocktemplate technology for local transaction selection.The author suggests a potential solution to prevent mining pools and reduce payoff variance by increasing the block rate and changing the Bitcoin PoW. This would involve transmitting information overhead to discourage miners from joining pools. The proposed BlockPow method can be made partially compatible with Bitcoin ASICs by modifying the block template. It is noted that the effectiveness of this method depends on the time it takes to transmit a block, which should not be a problem if the cryptocurrency becomes popular. To implement this solution for Bitcoin, the block rate would need to be reduced and blocks kept at a certain size.Overall, these discussions highlight the challenges and potential solutions related to mining pool decentralization, transaction validation, and preventing mining pools while reducing payoff variance.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T09:36:23.722554+00:00