#241: Mining pools, Braidpool, resistance to attacks, adversarial thinking, and dev funding with Bob McElrath
3/26/2021 · 62 min · transcript via mlx
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Key topics
— Mining pool protocols and their centralization risks: five large pools globally create a potential 51% attack surface and make censorship straightforward for governments.
— P2Pool's design and why it failed: it was a 30-second block time blockchain that accounted for mining shares but suffered from high orphan rates due to propagation latency.
— Braidpool as a successor: uses a directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure to allow very fast block times while miners set their own difficulty targets, removing the need for a centralized entity.
— Stratum V2 improvements: fixes communication protocols and payout mechanisms but does not eliminate counterparty risk or the fundamental reliance on a trusted pool operator.
— Governance pressure on pools: OFAC listings, KYC requirements, and jurisdictional arbitrage are already creating incentives for pools to censor transactions and miners.
— Funding and development: Braidpool requires approximately one year of effort and Bob McElrath is seeking to orchestrate grants rather than leave it unfunded as an open-source burden.
Market & price signals
— None discussed.
Actionable insights
— Miners should prepare to switch pools quickly in response to censorship or regulatory pressure; modern PPS (pay-per-share) systems make switching easier than older PPLNS structures.
— Advocate for decentralized pool solutions like Braidpool at the mining operation and policy level; centralized pools will face increasing government scrutiny as Bitcoin adoption grows.
— If you have capital to deploy, consider funding Braidpool development directly; Bob McElrath is organizing a grant structure and seeking contributors and financial supporters.
Episode sponsorships
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