BetterHash Mining Protocol

Mining
1

I wanted to bring up Matt Corallo’s BetterHash mining protocol proposal.

Aside from being a general improvement over the old and crusty Stratum protocol, it separates block construction from payouts.

This fights mining centralization by allowing miners to get the best of both worlds: Pooled payouts that minimize mining reward variability, while still being able to select which transactions to mine, and signal readiness for protocol upgrades.

This would be a great thing to consider for Grin. Reducing variability is the main reason that miners join pools, and having an option to still maintain independent policy regardless of pool participation would be a huge boon for decentralization. And, if this option is available to miners from the beginning, it might have a large effect on how the ecosystem develops.

Anyways, food for thought!

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Thanks for the suggestion @rodarmor, I’ve added it to the agenda for the next dev meeting, will try to read up a bit about it in the meanwhile. :slight_smile:

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Excellent! I’ll do my best to read up and attend as well.

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FWIW, this is now tracked on Github.

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