Mining Pool Insights: Technical Analysis of Stratum V1 Templates in Aggregate
A deep-dive into Stratum V1 mining templates and what their aggregated analysis reveals about mining pool operations. From these templates, we can extract meaningful insights about pool behaviors, coordination patterns, network characteristics, and bugs. I'll give a quick break-down of the Stratum V1 protocol's "mining.notify" message structure and how visualizing this data across multiple pools can show us interesting mining pool behaviors. I'll step through ~2 different recent cases using historical Stratum V1 data to understand pool behavior and cooperation: 1. Caching bug in Antpool's coinbase transaction builder: https://b10c.me/observations/14-antpool-and-friends-invalid-mining-jobs/ 2. Solana token marketing stunt: https://x.com/boerst/status/1882429452229198021 This presentation will appeal to those interested in mining pool centralization markers and the communication protocols that underpin the network today.