Subject: [bitcoin-dev] [Bitcoin Advent Calendar] Decentralized Coordination Free Mining Pools

From: Jeremy <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2021 08:43:12 -0800

Howdy, welcome to day 15!

Today's post covers a form of a mining pool that can be operated as sort of
a map-reduce over blocks without any "infrastructure".

https://rubin.io/bitcoin/2021/12/12/advent-15/

There's still some really open-ended questions (perhaps for y'all to
consider) around how to select an analyze the choice of window and payout
functions, but something like this could alleviate a lot of the
centralization pressures typically faced by pools.

Notably, compared to previous attempts, combining the payment pool payout
with this concept means that there is practically very little on-chain
overhead from this approach as the chain-load
for including payouts in every block is deferred for future cooperation
among miners. Although that can be considered cooperation itself, if you
think of it like a pipeline, the cooperation happens out of band from
mining and block production so it really is coordination free to mine.

Cheers,

Jeremy

--
@JeremyRubin <https://twitter.com/JeremyRubin>
<https://twitter.com/JeremyRubin>