vnprc commented 3 weeks ago

Description

What is this talk about? Give us as many details as possible.

Mining bitcoin has come to rely almost exclusively on incumbent mining pools serving as trusted third parties to produce block templates and process payouts. While the system works well enough for most miners, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely decentralized mining is not really possible, since mining pools cannot avoid bending the knee to the most well capitalized pool operator. The need for capital to smooth out mining reward variance increases pool centralization, limiting the minimum practical pool size and cutting off the possibility for small casual mining, and there is a broader cost in the loss of the ability to mine UTXOs that do not pass through custodial wallets. With the possibility of block withholding, the need for trust spreads. Mining pools must be wary of their hashers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud on the part of the mining pool cartel is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and privacy violations can be avoided by mining to a solo pool, but no mechanism exists to buy hashrate directly without a trusted party.

What is needed is a mining pool based on cryptographically secure anonymous free markets instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact mining shares for sats directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. Mining pools that do not use accounts for hashrate attribution would protect the hashers privacy, and ecash free markets could easily be implemented to protect buyer and seller privacy. In this talk, I propose a solution to the mining pool centralization problem using a self-hostable FOSS mining pool stack to generate ecash assets backed by mining shares. The system is robust as long as some honest pool operators, anywhere in the world, are able to host it without interference from the state.

Is there anything folks should read up on before they attend this talk?

Mining pool payout schemes: FPPS and PPLNS Ecash protocol basics: https://numbnoot.gandlaf.com/cashu A Proof of Liabilities Scheme for Ecash Mints: https://gist.github.com/callebtc/ed5228d1d8cbaade0104db5d1cf63939

Relevant Links

These Pools Are Consolidating Bitcoin Block Rewards with Antpool 0xB10C on twitter: pools mining on the same block templates Baerfoot Mining study: Ocean mining is more profitable

About the Speaker

vnprc is a bitcoin enthusiast, ecash accelerationist, and host of Triangle BitDevs

Social Links

Github: https://github.com/vnprc Twitter: https://x.com/vnprc lol fuck twitter The Nostr: https://primal.net/p/npub16vzjeglr653mrmyqvu0trwaq29az753wr9th3hyrm5p63kz2zu8qzumhgd

Talk Details

Length of Talk

I think I can fill 60m or get the core arguments across in 30m if time is tight.

Preferred Day/Time Slot

*We will do our best to accommodate your requested time slot. Please let us know if there are any dates/times that absolutely do not work for you.*

It's all up in the air right now. I'm volunteering for the Socratic Village. I have moderated the Lightning Socratic Seminar the past two years so I'll probably do that again plus perhaps 1 other talk TBD. I can be flexible early on. Last minute changes not so much.