Mining Pools

[magik6k]

I think it should be possible to build mining pools with the current system with no / minimal changes:

Assumptions:

• Slashing doesn't affect miner owner address in an way
• Block rewards are paid to the owner address
• Mining pools are honest

Operation:

• miner creates new miner actor, setting the worker key to a key he owns, and the owner key to the mining pool address
• miner operates normally, mining blocks whenever elected
• miner sends 'bad' election proofs to 'mining pool' off-chain to prove that he wasn't elected in a given round (otherwise he could silently not mine blocks but still get rewarded by mining pool)
• When mining pool receives a block reward, it can split the reward among it's participants based on power distribution, or whatever other heuristics it chooses to use.

[magik6k]

StorageMinerActor.ChangeWorker is a bit problematic for this setup, because it allows the mining pool to basically 'steal' the miner actor