Faced with the growing centralization of bitcoin mining pools, Jack Dorsey, Luke Dashjr and other developers are launching a new no KYC pool: OCEAN.
Bitcoin OCEAN
Luke Dashjr has resurrected his Eligius pool that closed in 2017. With funding from Jack Dorsey and others, this pool will restart with the ambition of further decentralizing bitcoin.
The timing of this announcement could not have been better since the F2pool pool was recently caught red-handed censoring transactions.
“ OCEAN solves a problem for bitcoiners that I think we all feel: the greater centralization of pools which could compromise a number of attributes of bitcoin that we hold dear”said Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and CEO of Block.
Indeed, and like the pool Request launched a few days earlier, Ocean also plans to implement the Stratum V2 protocol.
The flagship feature of Stratum V2 is to give back to miners the power to select the transactions inserted into the blocks. Power that was until now reserved for pools. There being only a dozen of them, the risk of censorship is obvious.
This new mining protocol also offers numerous efficiency gains, notably allowing faster communications between miners and pools.
Another very appreciable feature of Ocean is that it is NO KYC (Know your customer). In other words, a simple bitcoin address is enough to join the pool. No need to provide your identity card.
Everything is perfectly legal as long as the pool does not have custody of the bitcoins. Miners are paid directly through the coinbase transaction. The latter allows miners to grant themselves ex nihilo the reward of 6.25 BTC per block.
here is a block found by the pool in 2011 (when it was called Eligius). The coinbase transaction contains over 900 outputs, each corresponding to the bitcoin address of a customer in the pool. Ocean uses the same method. All Ocean does is coordinate the sharing based on each miner’s hashrate.
Each miner is paid as soon as the amount exceeds 0.01048576 BTC, not before. Payments below this threshold will accumulate until it is exceeded. The addition of the Lignhting Network in 2024 will eliminate this payment threshold.
In summary, Ocean is a radically more transparent and disintermediated pool than anything that currently exists. That said, for the moment the pool remains solely responsible for the selection of transactions.
In a second phase (2024), it is planned to allow miners to select transactions themselves. Thanks to Ocean, miners will become solo-miners benefiting from regular income.
Another good reason to join Ocean: no fees for two months, or even more…
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