After ten of waiting, miners are back in power with the Stratum V2 update.
More decentralization
This new open-source protocol is pushed by payments giant Block (Jack Dorsey), BitMEX exchange, Foundry pool, Galaxy Digital fund, brainsSpiral and Summer of Bitcoin.
Revealed on Tuesday, the Stratum V2 program will be industry tested for an official release in November.
One of the highly anticipated advancements is the ability for miners to choose the transactions contained in each block themselves. This privilege was until now reserved for a few pools of mining.
Almost no one mines solo anymore. Doing so means having a one in two million chance of earning 6.25 BTC every ten minutes. It is therefore better to go through pools which make it possible to smooth and distribute the gains in proportion to the computing power provided by each miner.
Bitcoin miners communicate with pools using a messaging protocol called Stratum V1. Unfortunately, this program sports a gaping security flaw: the ability for pools to censor certain transactions.
Indeed, the architecture of Stratum V1 is such that it is the pools that select the transactions included in each block. Suffice to say that we are light years away from the Ethos of Bitcoin since there are only a handful of pools that infiltrate the hashrate.
Conversely, Stratum V2 offers miners the possibility of creating blocks containing transactions chosen by them. This option would allow minors to revolt against the censorship of certain transactions. This simple threat will deter renegade pools.
Stratum V2 Reference Implementation (SRI) is here. This independent, community-driven, fully open-source implementation of the SV2 protocol is available immediately for pilot testing. »
Energy savings
Stratum is the third generation mining protocol. It follows on from the original Bitcoin client (CPU) as well as Getwork (GPU). Since the end of 2012, miners have been using ASICs (Application-specific integrated circuit) which have multiplied computing power and required a new protocol: Stratum.
Galaxy Digital recalls in this paper very comprehensive that it is “a Bitcoin Talk forum user named slush who developed Stratum”. He wrote in early 2012:
“The reason I designed Stratum […] is that the current ‘Getwork’ protocol has many flaws and can hardly be used on a large scale. ASICs are likely coming in late 2012, so we need a protocol that can handle multiple TH/s for each pool user. »
Slush was visionary since the Bitcoin network’s total hashrate was only 12 TH/s at the time. But the latter had not anticipated that BTC mining would become industrialized and that a single machine could generate 140 TH/s.
The entire fleet of machines now generates nearly 300 million TH/s. That’s 25 million times more than in 2012! Moreover, some sites include tens of thousands of machines.
And this is where the Stratum V1 protocol begins to show its limits. The reason being that each machine has its own direct connection to the pool. These redundant connections consume bandwidth unnecessarily.
Stratum V2 reduces the amount of data that flows between mining machines and pools.
Stratum V2
The first version of Stratum is not suitable for industrial-scale bitcoin mining due to the tens of thousands of connections to manage for large miners. This redundancy unnecessarily wastes significant amounts of energy.
To work around this problem, miners use proxy servers that pool all connections and establish only one connection to the pool.
Some proxy servers can be downloaded from GitHub, but most miners develop better solutions in-house to gain competitiveness. Stratum V2 will put everyone on a level playing field.
Removing unnecessary data will reduce CPU activity and bandwidth consumption resulting in power savings.
The two graphs from Galaxy Digital below illustrate what we just said about the Stratum V1 and V2 protocols:
Let’s finish by also pointing out that the amount of data transferred via Stratum V1 has not been minimized. Communicating with plain text in JSON format was convenient for early miners who could read and understand the protocol.
However, mining has become extremely competitive and many watts could be saved by using other languages.
Indeed, ASICs do not natively understand JSON. To execute these messages, the ASIC wastes time and computing resources to decrypt the JSON messages. Also, Stratum V1 circulates unnecessary messages.
Stratum V2 solves these problems by employing a binary protocol as well as suppressing all unnecessary messages, which helps to minimize the amount of data transferred. Ultimately, SV2 takes the strain off computer processors and bandwidth, which maximizes profits for miners.
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