Bitcoin++ Pool Edition has ended. Mempools and mining pools, and other mining adjacent things, are my favorite subjects in bitcoin because they are really important and have distributed incentives like any bitcoin layer (which is totally my jam). I'm super grateful it was in Austin. I went to every talk that I could.
- mining decentralization is in a perilous state
- the best production example of miner template creation is DATUM which is only available through Ocean because the pool software is closed source (it's slated to go open source though)
- the next best, just launched, thing we have is the first Stratum V2 Pool
- I'm bullish on decentralized mining pools but they're in an early state and not getting enough developer attention imo
- Hashpool might allow for a hash derivatives market that allows small pools to reduce payout variance in a ways similar to PPS
- As bad as mining pools centralization is, ASICs are more centraliziled, with most ASICs being proprietary, with closed specs and firmware, and from a single producer
- Even all BitAxes use these chips, which can only be made from disassembled miners because the ASICs cannot be bought a la carte
- several efforts are underway to produce alternative ASICs, most of them proprietary too, and barely scratch the surface of BitMain's dominance
- BitAxes are expected to use an alternative ASIC soon, although skot indicated he's under an NDA so couldn't give details
- a lot of hard and important work has gone into mempools the last few years despite claims that core is sitting on their hands because they aren't working on your favorite soft fork
- cluster mempool is expected to release in October of this year, and will be the finale of that work, making mempools behave exactly how we expect them to
- Splice lord @dusty is working on a 2nd layer mempool he doesn't want to call Delayed Transaction Protocol for aggregating txs, saving fees and improving privacy, without a centralized coordinator
- Discussions about
OP_RETURNlimits and mempool policy are unhinged online relative to in-person- Core admits they made some mistakes wrt moderation on github and apologized during their panel
- I'd encourage everyone to consider how novel, and complicated, their job is and that they aren't going to behave perfectly in every dimension even if you can imagine how someone might behave perfectly in retrospect
- Core admits they made some mistakes wrt moderation on github and apologized during their panel
- There isn't a worse fate for bitcoin mining than MEVil, which is addressed best by a relatively centralized marketplace, which is terrible
- The author of Bitcoin Miner's Almanac did a fantastic job surveying the mining system and the varied incentives at play, which aren't obvious if your vantage point is any particular domain