Eligius pool is back under the new name Ocean

[o_solo_miner]

Seems to be that Eligius is back under the new name ocean.
I wonder why Luke Dashjr. did not open up a thread about this.
 
source:
www.ocean.xyz

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[mikeywith]

I had a look at the pool, I found some interesting claims, such as

Today, pools operate like custodial bank accounts and have the ability to decide who can and who can't use Bitcoin

Isn't this how mining pools have always been from the get-go? what has changed? why does Luke think it's a recent development of some kind? in fact, before the Chinese government banned mining, 2-3 Chinese entities or perhaps people had well over 50% of the hashrate, furthermore, at that point, not only were mining pools centralized  -- the physical location of the hashrate origin was pretty damn centralized (which is still the case now, except it moved from China to the U.S).

As for censorship, it is no longer a matter of actual resistance but merely if and when the pools choose to do it there are 11 entities who decide what transactions go in (or stay out) of almost every block, and simply the 2 largest can impose censorship on everyone else with 100% success.

The first part is correct, although I doubt that at any point in the past, we had anything more than 11 large pools, however, the second part, 2 largest can't have 100% success in censorship, the two largest pools today own 55% of the hashrate, to make it easier to understand, let's just say the mine half the blocks out there, and thus their censorship success rate would be 0%, on average, every other block is found by someone else (not antpool and foundry), so there is always a 50% that you may need to wait for the 2 blocks to get 1 confirmation.

Obviously, it gets worse the more these two grow, even worse if they take in the 3rd largest pool with them, so ya, more pools will always help, however, I just dislike the sales pitch.

Now back to the pool itself, I see that this pool is not PPS, and thus, I don't see it going anywhere far, I sure can't be teaching someone Luke about Bitcoin mining history, but history shows that anything non-PPS is very likely to fail.

[DaveF]

It's on his twitter
https://twitter.com/ocean_mining/status/1729527427615932493

Personally I don't think it's gong to do well, but that is just me. More and more people want FPPS or similar.
And using other methods until they get larger is going to be a tough sell.

But, he might get traction. Time will tell.

-Dave

[alani123]

This is very interesting. Already the pool has more than 100 Pentahash per second judging by their own dashboard.
https://mempool.space/mining puts current network hashrate at 479.8 EH/s. A good start, hopefully it'll grow bigger.

One question I'm interested in asking, given Mr Luke's thoughts on Ordinals, will this pool mine BRC-20 and Ordinal NFT transactions in its blocks?

[DaveF]

This is very interesting. Already the pool has more than 100 Pentahash per second judging by their own dashboard.
https://mempool.space/mining puts current network hashrate at 479.8 EH/s. A good start, hopefully it'll grow bigger.

One question I'm interested in asking, given Mr Luke's thoughts on Ordinals, will this pool mine BRC-20 and Ordinal NFT transactions in its blocks?

I see it at 118.2 Ph/s from the top of the 1st page and from the list of miners.
Also, looking here https://ocean.xyz/blocktemplate you can see the TXs that they plan to put into a block if they find one. So you can check the individual TXs to see if they have BRC-20 in them.

-Dave

[alani123]

By the way, you all should definitely give a watch to the presentation of OCEAN:
https://youtu.be/_PH5sKrkzZY?t=14527

The panel and discussion about the pool start around the 4 hours and 2 minutes mark in the video.
Jack Dorsey, Luke Dashjr and OCEAN's Bitcoin Mechanic spoke and detailed what makes the pool unique.

Well the first 4 hours also had a few interesting parts but it's not directly related to the pool. I can try summarizing since I watched the whole thing.
Basically barefoot mining has put on an old hydro plant to put mining hardware under 100% clean energy. So a partner/supporter of the initiative is putting his own hashrate towards the pool, we can assume that's the bulk of the current hashrate that was switched on recently.

Jack Dorsey who also spoke, he seems to be a major backer of this project financially.

Then there was a lot of talk about how to get "pleb miners" on board in order to decentralize mining. Basically the best idea centered around integrating chips as heating elements to utilize them efficiently and desirable on a home environment. To make that feasible though more durable and more open chip technology must be made available. Jack Dorsey also revealed that his company Square has an ASIC research unit!?

Predictably there was quite a bit of talk about how much Ordinals suck. Although at no point in this presentation was it explicitly stated that the pool will be filtering Ordinal transactions out of mined blocks.

You should really watch the video and read the contents of the website for stuff about the pool in order to better understand technicalities around the pool and why it's superior and helps in decentralization.

Although I must mention one downside. Looking at the website's FAQ section, the minimum payout is 0.01048576. For so much talk about pleb miners, a payout threshold that high is kinda disappointing. Perhaps it would be technically feasible to decrease to a lower minimum dynamically. Hopefully that'll get looked into in the pool's future.

[DaveF]

Square has an ASIC research unit!?

Sort of, they bought the tech from intel when intel figured they could not make any money with it:

https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2023/04/28/jack-dorseys-block-snaps-up-bitcoin-mining-chip-as-intel-winds-down-production/

Although I must mention one downside. Looking at the website's FAQ section, the minimum payout is 0.01048576. For so much talk about pleb miners, a payout threshold that high is kinda disappointing. Perhaps it would be technically feasible to decrease to a lower minimum dynamically. Hopefully that'll get looked into in the pool's future.

Yeah, that is high. Back of the napkin math is about 60 days at 100 TH/s so someone with only a single miner would have to wait a while to get paid.

That gets into opportunity costs, are you better off loosing whatever % with a FPPS pool then waiting on your BTC
Obviously, everyone will be different, but it's something to think about.

-Dave

[mikeywith]

One question I'm interested in asking, given Mr Luke's thoughts on Ordinals, will this pool mine BRC-20 and Ordinal NFT transactions in its blocks?

Any rational pool would mine any thing marked as valid by the code that most other nodes operate, it does not matter what there inside, as long as it is valid and pays more -- should be in.

Any pool that does not do that will lose many miners, either for paying less than average or for censorship.

[HmmMAA]

One question I'm interested in asking, given Mr Luke's thoughts on Ordinals, will this pool mine BRC-20 and Ordinal NFT transactions in its blocks?

Any rational pool would mine any thing marked as valid by the code that most other nodes operate, it does not matter what there inside, as long as it is valid and pays more -- should be in.

Any pool that does not do that will lose many miners, either for paying less than average or for censorship.

According to that tweet https://twitter.com/checksum0/status/1730004768410493183 they are probably censoring high fee transactions ( probably ordinals and such ) .
Oh , the irony , the guys that are crying out loud about censorship are those censoring others . What a joke ( didn't expect something else from Luke and Jack tbh ) .
Good luck to the miners that decide to join them and burn money .
I would like to see if other pools will reject their block in case ocean pool hits the jackpot . Interesting times ahead .

[alani123]

Just as I along with many others suspected.
Mr. Luke has repeatedly called Ordinals an attack on bitcoin and had developed his bitcoin client to run without broadcasting them as a node.
I think it's good that such choice exists though, because so far all other pools were mining ordinals without consulting their miners at all.

Interestingly though, OCEAN has mentioned that miners will be able to propose their own block templates, being one of the first to do so.
So miners on OCEAN could easily propose their own block templates including ordinals no problem if they wanted.

[DaveF]

Oh , the irony , the guys that are crying out loud about censorship are those censoring others...

Luke has censored / blacklisted before when he tried to block some addresses related to BTC casinos.
Luke has 51% attacked coins he did not like: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56675.260
And lets not forget he was hacked earlier this year: https://gizmodo.com/bitcoin-price-hack-217-btc-og-developer-luke-dashjr-1849944799

So not a pool I would mine at, but whatever, people will always mine where they want.

-Dave

[HmmMAA]

Looks like ocean got their first block https://twitter.com/ocean_mining/status/1730524828757901470 .
It includes some ordinals but still down close to 0.30 btc in fees compared to what they could get .

[alani123]

OCEAN's block included 1571 inscriptions (Ordinal NFT images and BRC-20 tokens alike):
https://ordinals.com/block/000000000000000000009ef7ac2c30976bc7e05c2cdab10e5a5de7efd96492a7

So... These rumors about censorship weren't true at all!?
One has to wonder why these rumors weren't addressed in a more direct manner but hey... Good do know it was just FUD. The pool is only active for a few days.
Sooner than later it should allow for public access to its block template API and people will be able to bring it under all the scrutiny they want with even more transparency.

[DaveF]

OCEAN's block included 1571 inscriptions (Ordinal NFT images and BRC-20 tokens alike):
https://ordinals.com/block/000000000000000000009ef7ac2c30976bc7e05c2cdab10e5a5de7efd96492a7

So... These rumors about censorship weren't true at all!?
One has to wonder why these rumors weren't addressed in a more direct manner but hey... Good do know it was just FUD. The pool is only active for a few days.
Sooner than later it should allow for public access to its block template API and people will be able to bring it under all the scrutiny they want with even more transparency.

Until they are proven censorship would probably not a good idea as the blowback would be enormous.

With that being said, look at the post I made last night about LukeJR and some of the things Block / Square / Dorsey have done:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5341906.0

If they can show they are a reliable pool and are behaving well they will get people to mine there, but and this is just my opinion, there are a lot of trust issues to overcome 1st.

-Dave

[alani123]

OCEAN's block included 1571 inscriptions (Ordinal NFT images and BRC-20 tokens alike):
https://ordinals.com/block/000000000000000000009ef7ac2c30976bc7e05c2cdab10e5a5de7efd96492a7

So... These rumors about censorship weren't true at all!?
One has to wonder why these rumors weren't addressed in a more direct manner but hey... Good do know it was just FUD. The pool is only active for a few days.
Sooner than later it should allow for public access to its block template API and people will be able to bring it under all the scrutiny they want with even more transparency.

Until they are proven censorship would probably not a good idea as the blowback would be enormous.

With that being said, look at the post I made last night about LukeJR and some of the things Block / Square / Dorsey have done:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5341906.0

If they can show they are a reliable pool and are behaving well they will get people to mine there, but and this is just my opinion, there are a lot of trust issues to overcome 1st.

-Dave

As I understand it, there are quite a few bitcoin users that don't particularly like Ordinals and the effects they're having on bitcoin's blockchain, especially fees. So Luke isn't alone in that.
Surely plenty of miners would probably be on board in creating block templates that would not include Ordinal transactions.

But the thing with mining is that it has nothing to do with individual (person) support. It's all in the hashpower.
OCEAN has promised create infrastructure which would allow their miners to create their own block templates. And so far AFAIK there wasn't a pool that actually gave miners the opportunity to say no to mining ordinals. Once that update is released on the pool I guess there wouldn't be any reason for there to be any blowback. It would be purely the choice of miners to exclude ordinals from the transactions they confirm with their own hash.

[stompix]

First, we are a non-custodial pool. Miners are paid directly by the Bitcoin network. Here is a block found by the pool in 2011 (under the name Eligius). The generation trans
action contains over 900 outputs - this is the Bitcoin network paying miners directly. OCEAN uses the same transparent method. All OCEAN does is coordinate the correct split.

         
Ok, so their next block is going to be half full with the payments from their previous block!
But wait..

Currently, the threshold is 0.01048576 BTC or 1,048,576 sats
~
Rewards below this threshold will accumulate until it is exceeded, then the payout will occur automatically.
 

So, still custodial if you don't have 0.2% of the pool hashrate, so ~350TH/s right now.
Can't wait to see how this decentralized stuff will work with Ocean reaching 100exa and having a few tens of thousands of small miners. 
Luke turning into a big blocker will be looking at a duck screaming for a lifebuoy.

[o_solo_miner]

Currently, the threshold is 0.01048576 BTC or 1,048,576 sats
~
Rewards below this threshold will accumulate until it is exceeded, then the payout will occur automatically.
 

So, still custodial if you don't have 0.2% of the pool hashrate, so ~350TH/s right now.
Can't wait to see how this decentralized stuff will work with Ocean reaching 100exa and having a few tens of thousands of small miners. 
Luke turning into a big blocker will be looking at a duck screaming for a lifebuoy.

Yes, that was also a point I recogniced when I looked after the stats.
Looks like that only the big miners need to be decentralised on that pool.

[mikeywith]

Surely plenty of miners would probably be on board in creating block templates that would not include Ordinal transactions.

Ya, good luck finding miners who would leave money on the table.

So, still custodial if you don't have 0.2% of the pool hashrate, so ~350TH/s right now.

It is still custodial no matter what, the custodianship only ends when you receive your payouts to your wallet, and it starts again right after the first hash you submit, so the pool will always be custodial of something, be it your hashrate or the actually sats.

Currently, the pool would find a single block every 12 days, so in terms of custodianship, it's worse than all PPS pools, and it doesn't matter how much hashrate it gets, any PPS pool could outpace it in that regard, a PPS pool could start paying out every time they find a block or even every hour for that matter. so what gives?

You would expect that these devs would have created a truly decentralized mining pool, but no, just make another ordinary pool as if more pools will solve the problem, what happens when Luke gets a warning from the authorities and is forced to censor certain transactions, is he going to fight the government over it? creating a single point of failure is not going to solve censorship.

[alani123]

Surely plenty of miners would probably be on board in creating block templates that would not include Ordinal transactions.

Ya, good luck finding miners who would leave money on the table.

How sure are you that Ordinal transactions make sense to include in blocks economically?
Did you know that Ordinal transactions can get a ~75% fee discount from exploiting Taproot OP codes and SegWit?

Example: https://mempool.space/tx/77e996de08c48ed282a7b8bc88ca199712a15fa68babb10a0b3ee760674cf21b

So maybe it could be in a miners best interest to actually not mine any of them as they take too much space in blocks and get big discounts.

[HmmMAA]

But the thing with mining is that it has nothing to do with individual (person) support. It's all in the hashpower.
OCEAN has promised create infrastructure which would allow their miners to create their own block templates. And so far AFAIK there wasn't a pool that actually gave miners the opportunity to say no to mining ordinals. Once that update is released on the pool I guess there wouldn't be any reason for there to be any blowback. It would be purely the choice of miners to exclude ordinals from the transactions they confirm with their own hash.

That's job negotiation protocol of stratum V2 .
Miners creating their own templates will create a profitability disadvantage for the pool and the miners . If each user of ocean starts creating his own template that means that they will start working on it . So , the pool is not pointing it's entire hashrate for producing a block . It's essentially solo mining re introduced .
The reason pools were created is to increase/stabilize profitability . I don't see any reason miners will start using it in massive scale .
I'd like to hear what other people think .