Oddbean new post about login | logout It’s time for miners to wake up and start migrating to Sv2. Mining centralization is as bad as it’s ever been and the bullishness on bitcoin is totally unjustified given miners don’t seem to care about bitcoin in the slightest. If it doesn’t get better nearly every PoS chain is literally going to be more decentralized and censorship resistant than bitcoin. If you care about Bitcoin you are responsible for fixing this. Pressure miners.
Stratum V2 FTW
It seems to me that "mining centralization", or I suppose you mean large mining companies doing the heavy lifting is not really a problem. It gets done no matter whether its them or mom and pop operations all over the globe. The fact that miners "don't care about bitcoin is non-sequitur. Miners care about profits and mining bitcoin is profitable. This is pure capitalism and Satoshi's true vision.
The first miners were idealogues. Not profit driven. That came later.
So start a non-profit mining company.
Why start a company? Why not just buy miners and mine, like we used to?
Why doesn’t everyone grow all of their own food, raise their own beef, do their own taxes, make their own electricity, etc. I’m not saying I entirely disagree, but mining require technical competency and we would not be achieving the hash rate we have today if it was just plebs running it on a spare laptop. Then comes the profit motive. Why not get a bunch of people together and buy more miners, and you’re right back to forming a company.
Mining isn't that difficult - when ASICS are running at home you can also use that excess heat for other purposes. It was never envisaged that bit centralised mining companies would form and in the long term more smaller miners would help cut their incentive motive back a bit
Tinkerers need to keep at it and integrate mining into various home appliances. I like the space heaters and hot water tanks. When I eventually buy a home I plan to incorporate stuff like that. Still have to factor in energy prices, which may be the biggest factor. Eliminate the current crop of lunatic politicians and allow ourselves to produce cheap energy and it may become easier for normal people to mine a little. Corporate entities actually could help distribute mining as well. I have a dream where I’m running an energy company and right next to my nuclear power plant is a massive mining facility, and then I have an incentive program whereby my electric customers can run miners at home and contribute to the pool and get rebates.
I am serious though, a non-profit mining company could actually be a thing. Perhaps by operating pools with the social benefit of securing Bitcoin.
I think the issue is that miner centralisation reduces the censorship-resistance of the network, particularly if those miners are companies located in anti monetary freedom states.
Sv2?
https://stratumprotocol.org/
If i'd run this on a small miner like a bitaxe, would this help? Or what exactly can a small pleb like i do?
Isn't braiins leading the way on this? Or did I fall for some corporate hype while deploying their os to my space heaters?
They’ve contributed a lot to the design of it, but sadly they don’t yet allow you to select your own transactions when hashing. Only DEMAND allows that as of yet.
Cool. I'll do a bit of reading and then reply back to the braiins business development guy that contacted me last month 😊
Absolutely agree. Mining centralization is a serious issue that needs to be addressed. It's time for miners to prioritize the long-term health and decentralization of Bitcoin by migrating to Sv2. We all have a responsibility to ensure the strength and security of the network. #Bitcoin #Decentralization #Sv2 #Mining
is bitcoin mining council still a thing ?
That was formed to counter the Greenpeace fud if memory serves - I remember reading one of their reports recently enough which claimed bitcoin mining is now mostly done on renewables.
I think this happened when Elon backed away from using Bitcoin to buy and sell goods at Tesla for the reason of harm to the environment - something along the lines of jeopardising some environmental grant from the gov't that Tesla depended on. Saylor quickly stepped in to bring together all major bitcoin miners to establish some commitment towards renewables . I read the report - and while i can't remember the specific details, I remember it had minimal established input and was multiplied to get a nominal reference. I also remember thinking it was so much bollocks. In Francis's recent expose - he spoke about how there was a need for control and core devs were not giving in and one of the other options was through miners. It reminded me of the bitcoin mining council
I remember seeing all that and not caring, since it's a them problem, not an actual problem. So long as no "council" starts to claim to talk for Bitcoiners in general though I'm happy to leave them to it
Remember when miners were warned that ghash.io was getting too close to 50%, sat about 40 at the time and loads of miners immediately switched pools. Trouble is, now there's publicly owned mining companies and they have different incentives to true miners and Bitcoiners. They have to, as public companies they have a duty to maximise profits. We really need more small scall miners again to compete with these companies.
Why conform to the status quo when we can pave our own path? Mining centralization may be a concern, but let's not forget the innovative spirit that drives the crypto community. Let's think outside the box and explore alternative solutions rather than pressuring miners to conform. #BitcoinRevolution #DecentralizationIsKey 🚀🔗
can we fork off to a chain where consensus is that only Sv2 is allowed?:)
the true is that most of us can't get Asics to contribute. I'm in Brazil, getting an Asic here is not about having the money to buy, or actually it is, you gotta be rich. BitAxe have be doing a great job being a small miner that you can actually build from scratch. but that is a individual in a small group, we need people that can make it happen in a large scale
I agree with the tonality of the situation but calling anything PoS censorship resistant is a complete lie. Its not even PoS its AoS.
Go raise money and start mining! Nothing stoping you.
Miners are just service providers. What leverage do people have? It’s not like they can opt to not have their txns included in blocks mined by X miner Unless you’re proposing a political solution then there’s nothing users can do besides start mining themselves
Yes I’m proposing simple outreach. There’s no reason miners want to avoid Sv2, so it’s really just a question of socially convincing them to do a bit of work to switch.
I know very little about this, but it’s definitely a concern I’ve had regarding #bitcoin . Any good information for the curious?
Mining centralisation is on the following aspects: Timechain content responsibility and reward distribution. The chains in the timechain are created by single entities who determines what it contains. In order to manage income and combine hashing power to collaborate in order to get more (regular) profit, miners started to point their hashpower to centralized entities. In order to collaborate, all the hashers must join forces on the same thing, so in general miners started to follow instructions of a centralized entity in order to get on one line. This however gave much power to the central entity who can essentially command a hashing network to do what the central entity wants. Including what gets inside the chain. The second thing is coin distribution and it is heavily custodial for a network that is focused on non-custodial ownership. A miner cannot guarantee his ownership over his income unless he uses a special protocol. Which brings us to the solutions: there is an unscalable but fully decentralized protocol called p2pool and there is an other protocol called stratum v2 which can distribute the responsibility for managing what is inside the chain. Then there are seperate pools that are as transparant as possible and then there are attempts to make the miner income non-custodial.
First thanks for all your work on this. As a small miner how could I implement it? I go to: https://stratumprotocol.org but as non coding person I don’t know how to do that. Any chances for a easier way to implement or I just gfm and learn how to do it😄
https://stratumprotocol.org/getting-started/ should get you going mining against DEMAND (the only pool that supports Sv2 today). If you have any issues please join the Sv2 discord!
The only real pressure is economic incentive. Anything else is romanticism.
Nah that’s just naive. Sure, economic incentive is some of the best pressure, but social pressure works too, especially when there’s no economic disincentive as with Sv2. Why are public large bitcoin miners not being harassed on Twitter to adopt tech that is good for Bitcoin?
Isn't their disincentive that they will be left out if MEV comes to Bitcoin for real?
Yes, that’s also why if “MEV comes to Bitcoin for real” we should probably give up on Bitcoin as a censorship resistant system (and, really, thus Bitcoin as a whole).
I agree that miners should use Sv2, but why do you feel that MEV is an existential risk to bitcoin?
A miners business depends on the long term health of the network. If they harm the network for a short term profit today, they'll loose much harder, over the longer term, due to the decay and obscurity of a failed project.
Long term effects may not be as obvious to the miners ' investors as they are to me and you. Just saying
The only real pressure is economic incentive. Anything else is romanticism. nostr:nevent1qqsp2r4as5mlx7ms5jdjjj23tqagl997tkcfhdenjnqnz9ckuq2mxrqpr3mhxue69uhkummnw3ezucnfw33k76twv4ezuum0vd5kzmqzyq7ju52ss6vlnrc090d70fzmvu7xsllxgg85vmwzjmvshyyd282egqcyqqqqqqgr93q4l
Alternatively, or intermediately, they can mine with Ocean.
bitaxe fixes this
https://virginiafreedom.tech is selling
What should a pleb do? Buy a futurebit and plug into Ocean?
DEMAND is currently the only Sv2 pool. Ocean has said they want to add it eventually, but afaik don’t have a timeline. But, more generally, go talk to miners! Explain why this is critical for bitcoin, and, thus, their business. Harass them on Twitter, make sure they hear it.
Is their a monetary incentive for them to do so? Or is it purely an altruistic one for the good of the network.
What specific actions can I as a non-techy Bitcoin hodler take?
Could there be decentralized mining pool software that any miner could choose to run without the need to interact with or rely upon a central party? Some sort of p2p mining pool software?
P2Pool did this a long time ago! More recently Bob Mcelrath has been working on reviving a variant of it using DAGs to increase the share chain block rate calling it BraidPool. I believe it’s still fairly early on.
Can we call them hashers? If they aren't constricting a block template, all they're doing is hashing. Someone running a solo pool lotto nerdminer is mining. Someone plugging into antpool is just hashing.
How is it decentralized if pool operators can still unilaterally reject user templates in Stratum v2? The central point of failure still remains.
This just means we need proof of wack chain which is hybrid proof of work proof of stake now you do both let’s call it #Bithereum 🤣🤦🏼😆
