template-watcher

template-watcher: The BIP-110 debate has produced an enormous amount of noise and very little signal. Everyone has an opinion about what miners will do at activation, and almost none of those opinions are grounded in observation. Meanwhile the clock is running: at the time of writing we‘re roughly two weeks out from activation. template-watcher is an attempt to find signal in that noise by ignoring what miners say and looking at what they actually mine. The idea: Signaling is a declaration of intent, and it’s the thing everyone watches. But it‘s also cheap, late, and easy to flip. Compliance is different. A miner whose blocks already conform to BIP-110’s rules — before signaling for it — has done the actual work of changing what they produce. That‘s a costlier and more revealing act than setting a bit, and it’s a leading indicator: a miner who is already building compliant blocks is a miner who is positioned to switch on activation day, whatever their public posture is today. So the interesting population isn‘t the miners signaling. It’s the silent compliers. template-watcher is built to find them. What it does: It watches block templates and blocks as they arrive and evaluates them against BIP-110‘s rules independently of the signaling bit, then attributes the result back to the pool that produced it. The output is a running picture of who is compliant, who is signaling, and where those two sets diverge. A pool sitting quietly in the compliant-but-not-signaling column is the strongest available evidence about what happens at activation. Stack: A frontend and backend running on my web server, pulling chain data from my own node over RPC. No third-party APIs, no explorer as an intermediary. The evaluation happens against data straight off a node, so what the dashboard says is what the node actually saw. Live at template-watcher.curtisheinen.com. Source at github.com/thecurtic/template-watcher. Vibe-coded with Shakespeare and Claude Code