Check out the specs and progress on this repo first, it’s probably the most underrated project in the mining space right now:
https://github.com/braidpool/braidpool
We keep seeing the same charts about Foundry and Antpool controlling >50% of the hashrate. Most people just complain, but Braidpool is actually building a decentralized P2P pool that might actually scale where P2Pool failed.
The "magic" here is how they use a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) to handle shares. It allows miners to coordinate without a central leader, which is the missing piece for censorship resistance at the pool level.
My two cents on why this matters right now:
While everyone is talking about Stratum V2 (which is great for block template selection), it doesn't solve the payout centralization. Braidpool is designed to integrate with Stratum V2 but adds a decentralized payment layer.
The coolest part? They are looking at using Lightning/PTLCs for frequent, small payouts. Imagine mining and getting your sats instantly without needing to trust a pool operator to hold your balance or wait for a 0.01 BTC threshold.
If we want Bitcoin to stay permissionless, we need more than just "independent nodes"—we need independent hashers who don't rely on a single KYC'd entity to get paid.
Curious to hear from any miners here—would the complexity of running a local Braidpool node outweigh the benefit of "no-KYC/no-custody" mining for you?
#Mining #Bitcoin #Decentralization #StratumV2 #Braidpool
It's been a while since hearing about Braidpool. Is anyone still working on it?
Sorry for answering a little late, I was not online... but the answer to your question... Actually, it’s far from dead. They had some solid momentum recently—especially during the last "Summer of Bitcoin" where a few devs joined to build out the monitoring dashboard and clean up the spec.
If you check the Github activity, you'll see they’ve been moving towards a more robust Rust implementation and refining the FROST multisig setup for the payouts. It’s a complex beast because they’re trying to solve the "payout centralization" problem without the overhead that killed P2Pool.
The lead dev (pool2win) is still active, and they’ve been hanging out in their Discord/GitHub discussions. It’s definitely more of a "build in silence" vibe than a marketing-heavy project, which I personally prefer.