I agree - this was just a 6.43701991 BTC (USD $170k at the time of writing) bug that could probably have been avoided.
Oooooof. I'm super curious with what they're trying to achieve with their template experiments. Occam would say maximizing revenue and fee ordering might allow them to make adjustments to the template faster? I would assume Core does much of what's obvious here already though.
As the article states, this appears to have been avoidable should they have sent the block proposal to core for validation.1

Footnotes

Based on what I know, I assume they are building their own in-house mining pool implementation to replace the current implementation which is not in-house. Probably to save on licensing/contracting costs?
reply
I assumed there was a FOSS mining pool implementation that everyone was using but after googling around most appear to be GPL'd and/or archived. So bringing pool software development in house makes sense.
reply