A new pool has just been launched. Demand is the first to adopt the Stratum V2 bitcoin mining protocol.
Bitcoin Mining – Stratum V2
The pool Request presents itself as the first to fully adopt the Stratum V2 protocol.
In fact, the Braiins pool already uses this protocol (it is its creator). However, the function allowing miners to choose block transactions themselves is not yet activated.
It seems that large miners are in no hurry to adopt Stratum V2. So much so that Demand CEO Alejandro de la Torre is currently only targeting solo miners.
“With Stratum V2, we want to make solo mining more attractive, which will help decentralize the industry”did he declare.
Targeting solo miners is counterintuitive since, by definition, they do not pool their hashrate via pools…
This is probably a communication strategy aimed at familiarizing as many miners as possible with Stratum V2. The significant efficiency gains are in themselves already enough to be worth it.
Currently, it is the pools that select the transactions, which presents risks of censorship. We had a sad demonstration of this with the Chinese pool F2pool which deliberately censored certain bitcoin addresses last week.
In this case, the pool alone decided to censor certain transactions. But sooner or later, government authorities will come knocking on the doors of all pools to force them to censor certain addresses.
It is therefore in the interest of pools not to wait to be picked by OFAC to delegate the selection of transactions to miners. This is the flagship feature of Stratum V2.
A more efficient protocol
One of the main features of Stratum V2 is to encrypt communications between the miner and its pool.
This helps protect against certain attacks, as Alejandro de la Torre told Tea Mining pod :
“When I was vice-president of Poolin, we were victims of a so-called ‘cash poisoning’ attack carried out by China Telecom. They basically took all China-based pools offline. It is the fact that the data circulating between pools and miners is not encrypted which makes this attack possible. Stratum V2 helps mitigate this risk. »
Stratum V2 also promises reduced bandwidth consumption. On the one hand by encoding the messages in binary and on the other hand by eliminating certain redundant messages. We can read about stratumprotocol.org :
“Stratum V1’s human-readable JSON-RPC protocol makes messages 2-3 times heavier than necessary. Stratum V2’s binary encodings minimize message sizes, speeding up communications between miners and pools. »
Furthermore, Stratum V1 is not suitable for industrial-scale bitcoin mining due to the fact that each ASIC communicates directly with the pool. This results in unnecessary waste of significant quantities of energy. More information about this in our article: Stratum V2 – The miners regain power.
When you put it all together, Stratum V2 reduces the average message size from about 100 bytes (unencrypted) to 48 bytes (encrypted).
The end of empty blocks
Another advantage of Stratum V2: the removal of empty blocks which still arrive from time to time. According to Braininsabout 0.4% of the blocks are empty.
The explanation is that Stratum V1 cannot send miners the hash of the previous block without the transactions of the next block. The pools therefore send an empty block of transactions to quickly communicate the hash of the previous block.
For what ? Because the hash is the only data absolutely necessary for the miner. Receiving this hash allows them to hash for a few extra seconds. Blocks are sometimes found in this time frame which generally does not exceed a handful of seconds. This results in empty blocks.
It is different with the Stratum V2 protocol. Pools will simply send the hash of the last block via a single optimized 32-byte message. It is up to miners to prepare the block in advance and start mining upon receipt of the hash.
At a time when blocks are polluted by the worthy successors to the NFT scam that are ordinals, getting rid of empty blocks would be welcome.
Pools no longer have an excuse. The solutions are operational. It is high time to decentralize the selection of transactions before governments look into their cases.
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