The new update will allow the selection of transactions through a new sub-protocol and miner nodes.
The protocol developers have announced a new Reference Implementation Update (SRI) for Stratum v2.
According to a press release sent to Bitcoin Magazine, the new update is “an important milestone in the democratization of transaction selections in pool mining and the decentralization of bitcoin,” as it allows miners to select transactions through a new subprotocol and its node.
The developers are inviting miners, pools, firmware writers, and the community to test the new implementation using the start guide have assembled, with actual CPUs or mining devices. They also invite feedback from users after testing using this form.
It is recommended that new users test the software using SV1 mining appliances by connecting to an SV2 pool via Translation Proxy. “The miners will run their own template provider (bitcoind) with the maximum fee policy,” the statement describes. “Inside the translation proxy is a job negotiator that runs a sub-protocol responsible for distributing the miner templates to the pool.”
The press release describes how Job Negotiator “in combination with a template provider, puts the responsibility back on miners or an independent third party to provide a new template (selected transactions), making the bitcoin pool infrastructure more decentralized.” “.
According to the description of how a labor negotiator works (JN), the downstream mining farm runs a JN that connects to a JN run by the pool and requests a unique identifier for the mining jobs using the AllocateMiningJobToken message. The pool returns a unique token and a currency base output used for payments. The downstream JN then connects to a template provider, which sends a new template and SetNewPrevHash to the downstream JN. With these, a new job can be built and the downstream JN sends a CommitMiningJob message containing a proposed set of transactions to the pool. The pool always accepts the miner’s proposal in the current iteration, but in the next version, miners will have the ability to fall back to a different pool or solo mine if the pool does not accept the transactions selected by the downstream template provider . The Translation Proxy then sends a SetCustomMiningJob message to the pool, which verifies the job and returns a SetCustomMiningJobSuccess message. The translation proxy then translates the message and sends the mining.notify message to the mining devices, which send shares to the pool through the translation proxy.
With the current industry-adopted Stratum V1 mining protocol, a handful of mining pools participate in transaction selection, making Bitcoin more prone to censorship. Stratum v2 is an updated protocol, which ensures that the selection of transactions is done by the miners themselves.
The community has already tested the software on several popular mining devices; the press release encourages anyone testing on different platforms to fill out a form.
“With the next update,” the press release says, “we will add fallback functionality that would allow miners to fall back to a different pool or individual mine should the pool decide not to accept your suggestion. The miners, in that case, would disengage and back off.”
Other updates include a goal to improve encryption and ensure compliance with the latest specification updates, as well as plans to allow pools to perform spot checks on the validity of blocks. The most significant development will be sending a pull request to the template provider in Bitcoin Core.
Developers thank Stratum v2 fundraising supporters and include a link to their Discord for those interested in participating in the community.
