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AMA - Stratum V2 SRI team, yesterday we released an important update 1.0.0!

22.7k sats \ 55 comments \ @pavlenex 22 Mar AMA

zaps forwarded to @plebhash (25%) @lorban (25%) @GitGab19 (25%)

Hello everyone,

We are SRI (Stratum Reference Implementation).

An independent, community run, 100% free and open-source reference implementation of the Stratum V2 protocol.

Yesterday, after nearly 3 years of work, we've released an important update, bringing Stratum V2 from theory to reality.

Here are @pavlenex,@lorban, @GitGab19 and @plebhash from the team, happy to answer any questions around Stratum V2.

Feel free to ask anything! We'd love to answer any technical, non-technical, wine choices or good food recommendations!

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671 sats \ 9 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 22 Mar

Hi there,

First of all, thank you for your work! I have two questions:

Why did the blog post yesterday have a future date? 😂

https://imgprxy.stacker.news/EeqcRm0MCiqnuMpK2JanBu_t5ALtg_gqQftBRpm1o7I/rs:fit:1920:1080/aHR0cHM6Ly9tLnN0YWNrZXIubmV3cy8yMjIzNw https://stratumprotocol.org/blog/sri-1-0-0/

What are the main differences between V1 and V2, and how will it improve communication between miners?

Thanks

246 sats \ 2 replies \ @plebhash fwd 22 Mar

some resources on SV1 vs SV2 differences:

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @0xbitcoiner 22 Mar

I'll definitely watch the video later. Thanks!

262 sats \ 0 replies \ @plebhash fwd 22 Mar

it's actually a big playlist with multiple videos, but this specific one will introduce SV1 on a historical context and highlight why SV2 was necessary

95 sats \ 3 replies \ @pavlenex OP 22 Mar

Why did the blog post yesterday have a future date? 😂

Man, we wanted so badly to release on 3/21 - 3 2 1 that I got so excited and messed it up, it's been fixed now - thank you!

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 22 Mar

https://imgprxy.stacker.news/3cRFPWkig7GPVitnxgYVL8ssx5QJbTQGagoOufgoOG0/rs:fit:1920:1080/aHR0cHM6Ly9tLnN0YWNrZXIubmV3cy80Mzk0

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Muuny 22 Mar

can change the dates, got it.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nikotsla 22 Mar

https://m.stacker.news/22415

182 sats \ 1 reply \ @kr 22 Mar

@pavlenex is a time traveler, the secret is out now 🤷🏻‍♂️

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 22 Mar

😂

656 sats \ 2 replies \ @Godot 22 Mar

Is it worth it to try it with s9 homeheaters? What is your recommendation for those plebs who are mining with hosted services? Should we try to band together and ask the hosting company to upgrade? Or wait for more stable release?

718 sats \ 1 reply \ @plebhash fwd 22 Mar

SRI has a translator proxy which takes SV1 hashrate and sends it to SV2 pools.

That should allow for older devices (like the S9) to still be included in the game.

A translator proxy could be deployed by the hosted service or by the pleb miner themselves.

If the hosted service deploys the translator, the main innovation will be the ability for Template negotiation with the pleb miners.

If the pleb miner deploys the translator themselves, other improvements should come with it, namely:

faster communication while sending shares upstream
encrypted connection, which prevents MITM hashrate theft

175 sats \ 0 replies \ @Godot 22 Mar freebie

Got my side project for this weekend! Thank you!

722 sats \ 1 reply \ @thebitcoinbugle 22 Mar

Why does Stratum V2 matter (outside of better communication between pool and miner) if the pools with the majority of the hashrate such as Antpool, Via BTC, Foundry, Luxor, SBI Crypto, F2Pool, etc will likely never allow their customers to construct their own blocks?

Also doesn't it put the pool in a weird situation to have to choose whether or not to approve the miner's proposed block?

There is definitely many problems in mining. Curious how Stratum actually solved it in practice.

418 sats \ 0 replies \ @plebhash fwd 22 Mar freebie

Just because these pools dominate hashrate today, it doesn't mean they will do so forever.

As soon as market dynamics change, they could lose hashrate to other pools that provide more transparency.

In fact, block template is not the only issue with centralization on the mining industry nowadays. There's still lots of improvements to be made with regards to transparency and decentralization around share accounting and payout mechanisms. As soon as pools start implementing those (regardless of how small they are initially), other pools will be forced to follow.

SV2 doesn't really bring any innovation around these aspects however. That is still up to the pools to implement those.

592 sats \ 3 replies \ @davidw 22 Mar

What didn’t get added to the release that you wish could have, had you had more time & resources?

I’m sure you had to cut something ✂️ always love to know more about how decisions are made by builders

263 sats \ 2 replies \ @plebhash fwd 22 Mar

I still want to make more improvements to the roles implementations.

Right now they are just PoCs that demo how the low-level APIs can be used. But I want to eventually put them into a shape where they could be used as high-level API for custom implementations of roles (e.g.: pools, proxies and JDs).

320 sats \ 1 reply \ @davidw 22 Mar

And what would that potentially unlock in your mind? Allowing you to write more custom rules around which pool to use and when?

899 sats \ 0 replies \ @plebhash fwd 22 Mar

SRI stands for Stratum Reference Implementation, and is meant to act as the building blocks for the Bitcoin mining infrastructure.

Now imagine someone wants to write a sv2-enabled pool based on SRI. There are infinite different directions they could go, which I will try to summarize in two main ones:

leveraging low-level APIs

Right now, SRI has implementation for roles crates, which do include a "demo" pool. But this is just a dummy project which only exists for the purpose of showcasing how to wire the low-level libraries together (e.g.: crates under protocols, commons and utils). This pool implementation is somewhat opinionated in regards to multiple factors, namely:

threading model
error handling
socket handling
coinbase management (very simplistic)
share accounting (basically non-existent)

If someone wants to leverage the low-level libs while writing a production-ready pool from scratch under a different architecture, that is already doable. We believe these low-level crate libs are relatively mature, which is why they are all set as v1.0.0.

This is also likely a path to most pools that already have some codebase, but only wish to integrate SV2 in a modular way. While SRI is a Rust codebase, it provides FFIs to enable integration with other programing languages (e.g.: C, C++, Python).

leveraging high-level APIs

Putting low-level libraries together implies heavy-lifting. That could be time-consuming and somewhat prohibitive to small teams. That is why it is also desirable that SRI provides high-level libraries with building blocks for roles implementations.

That way, if some small team wishes to implement a pool in a specific way, SRI would already provide some building blocks for that. These building blocks would be opinionated with regards to threading model, error handling, socket handling and any other general aspects of the software. The pool team could then implement their own opinionated strategiesfor coinbase management and share accounting, without necessarilty spending thousands of man-hours on wiring together the low-level APIs.

507 sats \ 3 replies \ @Scoresby 22 Mar

Does this mean we can't ask "wen stratum v2?" anymore?

431 sats \ 0 replies \ @pavlenex OP 22 Mar

Haha, if I got satoshi every time someone asked WEN SV2... Exactly, it's now a reality, ready for implementation and direct usage. We've mined over 600 blocks on testnet internally and are pretty confident it's great first start. Of course as people start using the software, we expect improvements, bugs and updates.

354 sats \ 0 replies \ @plebhash fwd 22 Mar

it means everyone can/should give it a try and help the SRI team understand how the community intends to adopt it, so we can fix bugs and make adaptations to the APIs

468 sats \ 0 replies \ @lorban fwd 22 Mar

Yes it is finally here and it ready for miners to test it. Have a look! https://stratumprotocol.org/getting-started/

173 sats \ 3 replies \ @Coinsreporter 22 Mar

Congratulations! Do you believe that Bitcoin mining is essentially a thing for tech savvy people? If no, why do you think so and what are your plans to overboard non-technical people with Bitcoin mining?

532 sats \ 2 replies \ @plebhash fwd 22 Mar

I take it as part of my mission to democratize bitcoin mining, so in my ideal world it shouldn't be.

Unfortunately, it does require some fundamental knowledge and some research is advised. I do believe there is a sweet spot on how much technical knowledge someone needs, but this sweet spot is still to be found via collective learning and experimentation.

Pleb miners are fundamentally different to industrial miners, and there shouldn't be expectations to achieve the same level of profitability.

For example, the price of residencial energy on most places in the world today make it relatively hard to remain profitable.

That doesn't mean people shouldn't do it, nevertheless. It is still possible for a pleb miner to get small ASIC devices and do solo-mining with it, in a "lottery" style. That is mostly an ideologically driven activity, which could be labeled as "economically irrational". But hey, if you want to help decentralize bitcoin mining and you don't mind having the equivalent of an extra light-bulb on your electricity bill, why not?

Projects like the BitAxe are really helpful for this.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Godot 22 Mar

Use the mining to heat your house! I don't own the place I live. Otherwise I would replace the heating system with S19s in a heartbeat.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @expatriotic 24 Mar

Just bought 3 BitAxe's for some family members.

I'm gonna be mining with a host soon.

Question: Would you recommend getting a miner futures where I can lock in a few discounted miners. $3800 M60 170 TH/s 6.9c/kWh (Pay Apr 1, plug in Aug 1) Or would you recommend waiting til Aug 1 and seeing what's what. I feel fiat prices of miners will be much higher then.

143 sats \ 3 replies \ @kr 22 Mar

if you could only eat one meal at one restaurant anywhere in the world, which restaurant are you picking and what are you ordering?

698 sats \ 2 replies \ @pavlenex OP 22 Mar

I had the most amazing meal in our teammate's (Fi3) family owned restaurant in Florence last year, it was the first time some of us met in person.

I didn't order anything ,FI3 just keept ordering food until I passed out, here's one photo.

https://m.stacker.news/22402

Photo of me under the table available on request.

20 sats \ 1 reply \ @kr 22 Mar

Florence is the best, looks delicious

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nikotsla 22 Mar

Florence! once a year trip.

143 sats \ 2 replies \ @kr 22 Mar

how was your experience asking for grants and donations?

were there any important lessons you learned that might be useful for other FOSS builders looking for grants to support their work?

638 sats \ 0 replies \ @pavlenex OP 22 Mar

how was your experience asking for grants and donations?

One thing that's great since project's inception is that we're all funded by different entities. Thus far we had: Spiral, HRF, OpenSats, Foundry, Bitmex, Galaxy. Some of the entities even allowed their employees to work on SRI.

It's tough, but back when I started doing FOSS Bitcoin 7 years ago, situation is much better. There are now so many entities that recognize good and valuable work. I would say that each and every one of us first added some proof of work, before applying for a grant.

Situation can always be better, as someone handling this side of the things for contributors of SRI, one thing that could be better is mullti-year support so that contributors don't have to worry every 6-months or 12-months if their grants will be renewed,

were there any important lessons you learned that might be useful for other FOSS builders looking for grants to support their work?

Put in proof of work, even if it's in spare time and ensure community recognizes the value you're adding
When writing application always ask core contribution team to validate your ideas or areas you can be useful for the project
We need multi-year grants in this space asap, dealing with sustainability insecurities and constant renewals takes a toll on people.

657 sats \ 0 replies \ @plebhash fwd 22 Mar

I've been working on FOSS for about 5y now. I was on the shitcoin world until recently, but now I'm a grantee with Spiral and my experience towards a grant consisted of several factors:

Joining the Discord server
Joining SRI team calls
Following tutorials from stratumprotocol.org
Exploring codebase on github
Exploring issues and PRs on github
Reading the specs, and writing material to summarize my learnings

These items above helped me get context on the team activity. It is important not only to be willing to help, but also to understand what kind of help is needed, and what are the current priorities.

Eventually I saw SteveLee/moneyball mention on SV2 Discord that the SRI team needed experienced Rust devs to join the team and Spiral was willing to give out more grants. So I reached out to him and started talking. Some key points of our interaction were me sharing my CV and him telling me to join some calls with @pavlenex and @Fi3 to agree on what the project's roadmap needed more hands and how I could commit myself to helping it.

190 sats \ 2 replies \ @jakoyoh629 22 Mar

Tough question. How long do you think it will take for half of the network to be using this version? I know it will depend on many factors, but what is your prediction?

211 sats \ 0 replies \ @pavlenex OP 22 Mar

Tough one, I think if miners pressured pools, they'd be more likely to adopt it. We have interests from a few pools already, so reaching half of the network can take 2-3 years in my rough estimate.

210 sats \ 0 replies \ @plebhash fwd 22 Mar freebie

I find it hard to estimate a timeline. My imagination around this happens more in terms of sequence of events.

As soon as pools start adopting SV2, or even new pools show up (e.g.: Demand), we would expect more hashrate being produced via SV2.

If we start to notice a trend where SV1 hashrate starts migrating towards SV2 (even if via translator proxies, from legacy SV1 ASICs), that will be a clear pressure for legacy pools to start moving towards adoption, and everything should be a trickle down effect from there.

53 sats \ 2 replies \ @kr 22 Mar

thanks for hosting this AMA guys!

what is one Bitcoin mining opinion you each hold that most Bitcoiners might disagree with?

387 sats \ 0 replies \ @pavlenex OP 22 Mar

As someone who hasn't done any "mining" projects before doing SRI, I realized mining space is way more competitive than I imagined. Getting two companies to agree on something is extremely hard, and even us, as FOSS struggle communicating things to companies.

283 sats \ 0 replies \ @GitGab19 fwd 22 Mar

Pools are not as much evil as you might think! :P

20 sats \ 1 reply \ @Bitcoinisawesome 22 Mar

How will stratum V2 help the oppressed in the long term?

110 sats \ 0 replies \ @pavlenex OP 22 Mar

Stratum V2 democratizes transaction selection, ensuring that pools can't censor transactions.

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 22 Mar

What was the most surprising thing you learned working on Stratum V2?

210 sats \ 0 replies \ @pavlenex OP 22 Mar

Italians don't love to work on Fridays!

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 22 Mar

I love the pool fallback idea! Do you expect many pools to switch right away?

110 sats \ 0 replies \ @pavlenex OP 22 Mar

It's the miners that are switching the pool in case their template gets rejected. :)

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 22 Mar freebie

In retrospect, what kind of help from the community do you wish you had more of?

110 sats \ 0 replies \ @pavlenex OP 22 Mar

More help testing, more people asking questions, more companies willing to support contributors financially.

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @lorenzo_lfm 22 Mar freebie

Hey! Congrats to all contributors on this incredible achievement. I'm definitely gonna add this in the next Bitdevs.

I'm interested to know what is the top priorities for the near and mid term future of the project?

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @plebhash fwd 23 Mar

for the short term: working closely with mining industry players to get feedback
for the mid term, maybe @pavlenex has a more elaborate answer, but from my side I'd say the same from this answer: #476081

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @DudeJLebowski 23 Mar

I don't have anything to ask you, just popped by to say congrats on the release and I love it.