Bitcoin Forum

Hi All,

I've been absent a while... Some might remember me. I wrote PoolServerJ which was the engine behind many of the early mining pools including BTC Guild.  I left this bitcoiny world rather suddenly several years ago due some rather dramatic personal circumstances which I never explained publicly. At the time I had big plans for a complete rewrite of PSJ. Eliminating huge quantities of code that existed for the sake of extreme optimisation required to offset inefficiencies of the basic rpc getwork model of mining. Optimisation that became largely irellevant after internal work generation was implemented in PSJ. I had grand plans of pushing a new mining protocol to deal with the inefficiencies of getwork. I never got that far... A year after I disappeared the stratum protocol was born to fill that exact need and PSJ became obsolete.

After a long time out of the crypto scene I've had my interest (obsession?) reignited by a few well meaning folk reminding what it once meant to me... So I'm looking for the right place to apply my skills and make a contribution again... Writing pool server engines is what i did best so it's the obvious place to start... PoolServerJ is dead. 80% of it's code is no longer relevant. Mega optimised code is also no longer a requirement for pools since many of the bottlenecks that existed back then no longer do. So I'm in no way tied to java like I was once. There are several good mining pool frameworks around just waiting for improvement. Although I'm more python friendly than I am to nodejs I'm quite liking node-stratum-pool as a starting point. Although I'm not particularly bound to any language nor any preference over native code vs scripted or JIT based.  But I figure if I've written a pool from scratch I've earned the right to extend on another pool engine authors work ;)

So my question to pool operators is simple to ask though perhaps not so simple to answer... What are the features that you want or need from a pool engine that you haven't got today?

I'm not promising any magic new pool engine. Just exploring ideas to see what's needed and work out if/how I could deliver it....

An open-source pool that supports ASICBOOST would certainly find a niche. Both overt and covert ASICBOOST would be of interest to various groups. Just be aware that some of the interest would be negative, i.e. they would try to DDoS you off the Internet if you host it yourselves or you would receive various forms of threats and insults if you just publish the code.

AFAIK there's no open documentation on how the Bitmain's miners extended "stratum mining" protocol to support ASICBOOST, but apparently someone reverse-engineered it sufficiently enough to get it to work.

You're welcome to join the open code here instead of starting another project from scratch unless you don't want to work in c:
https://bitbucket.org/ckolivas/ckpool

Hi Con... Long time no C.

/me clubs shads over the head for such a terrible pun

Careful ck will get Mikestang on your butt!!!!!!!!!   :D