- The Stratum mining pool announced the update to Stratum v2 which will allow the selection of transactions through a new sub-protocol and miner nodes.
- According to the firm, this will allow the democratization of transaction selection in pool mining and the decentralization of Bitcoin.
Mining, so criticized for its excessive use of energy, is essential for the operation of the Bitcoin network. Without the miners, who are in charge of approving transactions and bringing the blockchain to life, the most popular cryptocurrency protocol on the market would not work.
Given this scenario, stratum plays a key role for decentralized BTC mining and the developers announced in the last few hours the Stratum v2 update, which was initially launched in November 2022. It is worth noting that this protocol is used by the vast majority of Bitcoin miners.
What does this new implementation bring? “It will allow the selection of transactions through a new sub-protocol and miner nodes”, as explained by the company in a press release published by Bitcoin Magazineand they added that this is “an important milestone in the democratization of transaction selection in pool mining and the decentralization of Bitcoin“.
Stratum seeks feedback from crypto miners
From the work team of Stratum wait for community feedback, so they invite miners, pools, and firmware makers to try a new update. The first recommendation they made is to do so using SV1 mining devices connecting to an SV2 pool via Translation Proxy.
“The miners will run their own template provider (bitcoind) with the maximum fee policy. Inside the Translation Proxy is a Job Negotiator that runs a sub-protocol responsible for distributing the miners’ templates to the pool,” they explained.
While announcing how the aforementioned Job Negotiator works:
“In combination with a template provider it puts the responsibility back on the miners or an independent third party to provide a new template (select transactions), thus making the Bitcoin pool infrastructure more decentralized”.
How does the Job Negotiator work?
Next, the step by step of the operation of the Job Negotiator.
- The mining farm runs a JN that immediately connects to a JN run by the pool, requesting a unique identifier for the mining jobs via the AllocateMiningJobToken message. This will not change.
- The pool then sends back a unique token along with a coinbase output for payments.
- The JN connects to a template provider, which launches a new one with the SetNewPrevHash message.
- So a new job is built and the JN sends the CommitMiningJob message. The pool always accepts the miner’s proposal. Once the process is complete, the Translation Proxy sends SetCustomMiningJob to the pool. Once everything is verified, respond with SetCustomMiningJobSuccess.
- As a closure, Translation Proxy translates the message and writes mining.notify to the mining devices, which send the shares to the pool through the Translation Proxy.
Although they are just testing this new update, Stratum is clear about the next steps to follow. They will seek to add a “withdraw functionality that will allow miners to return to a different pool or mine solo in case the pool decides not to accept your suggestion”.
They are also behind improving the encryption as well as allowing pools to perform specific checks on the validity of blocks such as sending a pull request for Bitcoin Core.
The Bitcoin network is the key piece for the entire operation of the crypto space, so improvements for its decentralization always tend to have a positive impact.
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