Ecash does not remove the postgres database or any pool visibility—the pool will still have (and must have) full visibility over shares submitted because it needs to do accounting and proper payouts according to those shares.
Share accounting is also reward accounting, so the only improvement here is we are relying on a trusted mint to be a valid custodian of the Bitcoin, not just the pool (unless the pool is the mint, which kind of defeats the purpose of the ecash because the pool still has full visibility over the share accounting).
I cannot see any additional benefit here, just an additional trusted third party…
How do you know your shares aren't being dilluted by the pool?
Equivalently stated, how do you know your reward is diminishing because another pool is block withholding your pool (results in share dilution in the same way as pool “share dilution”)?
The answer is the same: you don’t. You just receive less money. However it’s in the pool’s best interest to reward miners the maximum they can or else miners leave to competitor pools with higher payouts. Riot left Braiins after a period of bad variance luck, and that could be because entropy, or potentially a little competitive block withholding. Thats the motivation for competitor pools to block withhold: ruin payouts in one pool so miners get a bad impression and switch pools.
Mining pools have a principal-agent trust dynamic that is inherent to the distribution of work. Miners are trusted to perform honest work and pools are trusted to pay them for it. Adding ecash anywhere isn’t gonna change those dynamics because they are baked in.
Bleeding edge innovation here is by Demand pool and Braidpool, with Demand being much closer to production ready transparent share accounting.
Look forward to reading up on Demand's protocol for share transparency. Will it be FOSS?
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