Is there any working merge-mining in BTC?

[Drawesome]

Hi there,

I've noticed there are some new Layer 2 (L2) projects being announced, and I'm curious if any of them are currently successfully implementing merge-mining.

Cheers!

[ABCbits]

There are few sidechain, L2 and altcoin which already achieve that. For example, block 837793 mined by AntPool[1] shows coinbase TX for Rootstock merge mining[1] data. Namecoin also let you perform merge mining, but i don't remember which pool does that or how the data included on Bitcoin's block.

[1] https://mempool.space/block/000000000000000000022128be0025a6602b89b5b01c04dfa4dfe6d398922143
[2] https://rootstock.io/mine-btc-with-rootstock/

[DaveF]

L2 has nothing to do with merged-mining.

Very high level:
Merged mining a.k.a. Auxiliary Proof of Work allows a mining pool to mine 2 or more of the same type of coin (SHA256, Scrypt, etc) at the same time so long as the other coin is designed to work that way. The primary coin (BTC, LTC) mining works the same. If a pool is setup properly there is no impact.

L2 is something like the lightning network, it works with the L1 chain (BTC,LTC) and does "it's own thing' with those coins. It needs the L1 network to move coins to it and take them off but once they are there for the most part it does not need the L1.

As i said, a very high level view, you can go down a very deep hole digging into how they work.

-Dave

[Yamane_Keto]

Hi there,

I've noticed there are some new Layer 2 (L2) projects being announced, and I'm curious if any of them are currently successfully implementing merge-mining.

Cheers!

Merged mining is not a new idea and was implemented in Namecoin in 2011. You can see its details https://github.com/namecoin/wiki/blob/master/Merged-Mining.mediawiki#Goal_of_this_%20namecoin_change

As for its successful application, F2pool supports ELA merged mining, which allows to mine ELA tokens alongside BTC. You can see the steps here https://f2pool.medium.com/mine-btc-with-f2pool-and-receive-ela-vcash- and-nmc-merged-mining-rewards-52cc196c4333

ViaBTC had similar plans but the latest is two sidechains under development called Coordinate and Alys, one for Ordinals and the other for EVM-compatible with a system called Anduro by Marathon Digital Holdings, here was announced https://ir.mara.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1344/ marathon-digital-holdings-introduces-anduro-a-new

I do not like the idea of merging-mining sidechains because it gives a false sense of security, especially since the new project's direction is to use the name Bitcoin to give users a sense of security and that the new network is safe from 51% attacks.