The collaboration of Bitcoin miners has increased in popularity in recent years. In a so-called mining pool, miners combine the computing power to jointly have a greater chance of adding a new block to the blockchain. With increasing competition and as a result rising mining difficulty, the chance of successfully mining bitcoin (BTC) as a private person decreases significantly over the years. Today, a large part of the hash rate therefore dominated by these pools of miners.
These mining pools are within the community a threat to the centralization of the network. Stratum v2, an overhaul of Bitcoin mining, aims to reduce the power of mining pools.
Censorship Resistance Bitcoin
Stratum v1, which is to be replaced by V2, has its problems as the mining pools have a single point of failure and make the entire network susceptible to censorship. For example, regulators could force certain mining pools not to include certain transactions in a block.
This while censorship resistance is one of the basic principles of the Bitcoin network. There is no authority that decides who can participate in the network and no one can block or reject transactions from the blockchain.
Bitcoin mining updates
In the latest release of the open source version of the Stratum v2 (SV2) protocol, Stratum Reference Implementation (SRI), developers announced that they ”job negotiation” have completed, an important function for the broader Bitcoin industry. This would give the mining pools less power over transaction selection.
Since 2018, Bitcoin developers have been working on SV2, which connects miners to mining pools in a more seamless way, making mining more efficient and secure. But the job negotiation is perhaps the most important part of SV2.
This gives the task of transaction selection to individual miners, making mining pools less of a target for censorship. This means that instead of going to a large mining pool and telling them to block certain transactions, a government would have to go individually to all hundreds of miners to make such a request.
However, SV2 is still in development, but it would be a positive development for the Bitcoin network as a whole.
