To free the miners of the pools looks for the new Bitcoin improvement proposal
The Bitcoin Core team developer, Matt Corallo made a Bitcoin improvement proposal focused on enhancing the independence of the mining nodes of the mining pools. Corallo sent his proposal entitled BetterHash Mining Protocol (s) through the Bitcoin Core team's mailing list, on June 5.
According to the document in GitHub of the proposal, the objective is to help the decentralization of mining from two proposals: the change of the getblocktemplate function, which allows the selection of the blocks to work by the pools, and the overcoming of the current Stratum mining protocol, by which all mining clients communicate with the pools.
These two protocols generate a high dependence on the mining equipment that participates in the mining pool. With the changes suggested by Corrallo, it hopes to reduce the work assigned to the pools, by allowing the mining nodes to select the work blocks they wish to confirm, also to manage the payments for the found blocks and reduce the load on the Stratum servers, as well as , allow a more secure communication between nodes and pools. With these effects in mind Corrallo proposes to reduce the influence in Bitcoin mining by the large mining pools.
The Stratum protocol has been used since 2012 and is one of the main elements for the operation of grouped mining (pool mining). Despite its success and popularity, this protocol was not introduced through a BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposals). Another criticism that has suffered constantly is that its development has occurred privately, behind closed doors and without being authenticated by developers.
Stratum requires pool operators to build block templates with specifications determined by getblocktemplate that, according to Corallo, compromise the well-being of network decentralization. Therefore, to achieve what has already been proposed, it proposes to leave both protocols behind and rewrite them, so that any mining pool can allow users to work with blocks that use another protocol. With this it would allow to receive the reward of the block in a pool and to work in the construction of the block in another.
Among the arguments that motivate his proposal, he affirms that the implementation of Stratum requires each miner to point to a commonly shared Stratum server, resulting in a flood of individual connections to the servers, slowing down the connectivity to the network and compromising a greater number of operators on each server. In addition to allowing a vulnerability, of a possible intervention of the data transmitted by a third party, by a low level of cryptography that they possess.
For this BetterHash proposes the separation of the channels that carry the information of the work and the payment information of the pools, this to enable the ability to create their own block templates to the participants of the group, without affecting their execution, nor the reward for its processing.
"The segregation of these functions provides group participants with the ability to build block templates with the transactions that they (or another group of their choice) have selected while the pool supervises the distribution of payments," Corallo said, adding that with BetterHash, "miners can reduce their variance of payment and create their own block templates." The update seeks to decentralize mining without losing its efficiency.
The proposal of Matt Corallo comes to be one of the new proposals that seek to combat the criticized centralization of Bitcoin mining. Some Bitcoin developers believe that it is one of the great weaknesses of the Bitcoin network, since it could be prone to several types of attacks, if a group of miners decided to behave in a malicious way. Despite this, bitcoin mining continues to grow and more participants enter, as is the case of the Japanese GMO corporation and the Samsung Koreans.