I’m a Spiral grantee working as a contributor to StratumV2 Reference Implementation (SRI).
In a time where the Bitmain FPPS debt-slavery cartel is pushing Bitcoin towards dangerous levels of mining centralization, this post is extremely relevant and I would love to see more engagement from mining players here.
The ideas presented on the paper titled PPLNS with Job Declaration are academically sound and it’s refreshing to see that Demand Pool has some talented minds proposing a tangible path out of the dark situation Bitcoin is currently under.
Remember that while SV2 allows for hashers to choose their own templates via Job Declaration (JD), the protocol itself is inherently agnostic to:
- share accounting
- reward distribution
So when a pool decides what kind of algorithms to employ to solve those two specific problems, their design space is limited to:
- hashers blindly trusting the pool is fair
- feeding back information to hashers to minimize trust
And if they choose the second path, they will inevitably need protocol extensions.
Now, SV2 decentralizes via JD!
Which means hashers have the right to be paid for hashing on templates that could be economically suboptimal with regards to fee revenue… that could happen for different reasons:
- maybe the hasher’s Template Providing (TP) node is suboptimally connected (remote location, poor internet, plebhashers) and the “mempool” they see is suboptimal.
- maybe they are ideologically driven and see some categories of consensus-valid transactions as spam (which is a subjective term, albeit introduced by Satoshi and ingrained into protocol primitives).
- maybe they want to do MEVil and prioritize transactions under some specific meta-protocol.
- maybe they want to filter out consensus-valid transactions that would hurt low-end nodes (see GCC for more).
So an economically rational pool needs a mechanism to still allow for jobs with low-revenue templates, while rewarding them fairly with regards to jobs with more economically optimal templates, which is work that deserves to be rewarded more.
And in order for hashers to be willing to put some level of trust on the pool, they need to be fed back some info to give them reassurance about how their templates are being rewarded fairly in proportion to other hashers. That is exactly what this new SV2 protocol extension proposes, and I’m happy it’s built on top of PPLNS, rather than FPPS.
I’m looking forward to following this Discussion on SRI repo, where Braiins, Demand, and SRI engineers are shaping up the implementation details for the first ever SV2 protocol extension.