Any interest in a VPN-enabled mining pool?

[tjwebb]

Around the internet, I see considerable interest in mining through a VPN to protect one's privacy. For example, it's reasonable that you may not want unencrypted mining traffic to be observable by your ISP or others outside your home network. But there are some common concerns:

- Increased latency between miner and pool
- Increased costs/complexity of running your own VPN
- Unsure of the correct way to implement a VPN solution to guarantee security

If a mining pool had a low-latency VPN attached to the same network as the stratum server and full node, what is the level of interest in mining with a pool that supported this?

[PassThePopcorn]

I would think anyone that wants something like this would just run their own pool locally or be large enough that one of the pools would send them equipment to keep locally. For a day to day user I'm not sure what benefits this would bring. Apart from the ISP knowing you are mining, which I don't think I've come across any ISP's that don't like miners. Maybe this is different elsewhere?

[kano]

Simplest answer (that many pools ignore) is that NOT losing blocks is what matters.

A VPN clearly increases the risk of losing blocks due to routing packets via a longer path and via who knows where.
Your connectivity to the pool is what matters.

Any smart pool (like mine) allows connectivity on multiple ports to avoid being blocked - in my case 3333, 80, 81, 443, 8080

Using a VPN for mining is a bad idea.

[BeetcoinScummer]

The biggest problem is that most mining hardware are incapable of directly establishing the VPN connections themselves. This complicates the client-side setup. The pool user would need to set up some kind of host in their local network to run the VPN client and also some kind of stratum proxy that accepts local connections and forwards them through the VPN.

If you cared enough about privacy, it would be more flexible to set up an SSH server on AWS and forward your stratum connections through an SSH tunnel to any pool of your choice. You can change the AWS instance periodically and get a new IP address if you are that paranoid.