Hello There!
Every pool communicates with his clients, the miners, in order to tell them what to work on.
In the future, once Stratum V2 is the main comms protocol for most pools, that might not be necessary, as every miner will be choosing his own transactions and crafting his own blocks with their node.
But until then, we can check on what the pools whisper to their miners and see if we can infer anything from those whispers. Like Varys from GoT, controlling the Red Keep with his network of spies.
Well, until recently, checking in on those whispers was rather inaccesible, even for miners themselves, unless you were quite technical. But the past months has brought a plethora of new tools that turn those whispers into screams.
b10c shines a light
This all started back on April 2024, when @0xB10C brought this feature of Stratum V1 to the forefront of Bitcoin Twitter's mindspace by highlighting the pool centralization issue brough up by Mononautical.
The Proxy Pool report
This lead him down the merkle tree rabbit hole, which culminated in a report on September under the name of "Block Template Similarities between Mining Pools", diving deeper on the issue and linking certain pools using their announced merkle trees.
While this shows strong connections that basically signal proxy pools, this is all independent of which financing mechanisms FPPS pools use, which also turns some of them into de-facto proxy pools.
Boerst Notices Empty Blocks
A few months later, now in the new year of 2025, another mining magician that had also been scrutinising the announced merkle trees by pool, notices that a whole set of pools start sending empty blocks to their miners. That's weird behaviour, especially when a whole bunch of them, accounting for 115EH (15% of the network) start doing it at the same time.
More signs that weird things are going on behind close doors in the mining pool space.
The tools available to hear those screams
Thankfully, nowadays we have some pretty nice and accesible tools in order to check, in real time, what pools are doing.
We have 2 main options:
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https://stratum.work/ Boerst created Stratum. work, which is dynamic and quite interesting to watch.
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https://mempool.space/stratum Our dear friends over at Mempool. space created this subsection of the website which is hard to access, as I haven't found a way yet to navigate to it. Nonetheless, It's also dynamic, and features these tree branches that make it very easy to know which pools are in kahoots.
I hope you enjoyed this little deep dive, and enjoy the tools that our friends build.
Use them to keep the Pools in check, and call them out for any shady behaviour!
May the Hash be with you!