Bob McElrath

#241: Mining pools, Braidpool, resistance to attacks, adversarial thinking, and dev funding with Bob McElrath

- 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.