Bitcoin's entire value proposition rests of censorship-resistance, which can only be guaranteed by decentralized miners competing to produce blocks.
The current state of Bitcoin mining decentralization is, unfortunately, not great. Many large pools which were previously thought to be independent now seem to be mere proxies for AntPool, with the same transaction selection policies.
Fortunately, there is hope.
Stratum V2 is an upgrade to Bitcoin's pooled mining protocol which allows miners, not the pools they mine for, to choose the transactions included in each block. This allows miners to pool in order to reduce payout variance, without giving up their ability to construct block templates.
stratumprotocol.org
Stratum V2 has been in development for a long time, but it works, it's basically ready, and it's time for serious testing.
If you're a miner, consider giving one of your engineers time and a few machines to experiment with Stratum v2, point them at @DEMAND_POOL, a Stratum v2 mining pool, see how things work, and report anything that goes wrong. I'm sure there are fine folks who would love to help you in the Stratum V2 Discord.
discord.com/invite/fsEW23w…
GHLF! It's high time that we get this transition underway.
Looking at the merkle branches that mining pools send to miners as part of stratum jobs, it's clear that the BTCcom pool, Binance pool, Poolin, EMCD, Rawpool, and possibly Braiins* have exactly the same template and custom transaction prioritization as AntPool.
