The new open-source tool aims to accelerate the adoption of Stratum V2 by improving data on the new protocol’s efficiency. Interview with Gabriele Vernetti, open-source developer of Stratum V2.
Almost five months after the release of the first open-source version of Stratum V2, the Stratum Benchmarking Tool has been launched. The tool, developed by Gabriele Vernetti with support from OpenSats, aims to improve how miners and mining pools evaluate the performance of mining protocols.
Atlas21 interviewed the person directly involved, Gabriele Vernetti.
What is the goal of the Stratum Benchmarking Tool?
“The main goal is to provide a tool that can be used by anyone, particularly miners and mining pool operators, to analyze and measure the performance of Stratum V2 compared to Stratum V1 through the generation of detailed reports. Essentially, it aims to empirically demonstrate all the efficiency gains derived from Stratum V2. The primary interest of miners and mining pools is to optimize their operations. Another goal of the tool is to simplify the testing of the Stratum V2 protocol, which is not currently easy to do.”
Is it usable by all mining pools? Can solo-miners install it as well?
“Yes, absolutely. Anyone can use the tool. It can be used by those who want to see how Stratum V2 works for educational purposes, by mining pools to connect machines to the tool, and by miners to analyze the performance of their own machines. For educational testing, you can also use a CPU Miner, which is software that allows a computer to act as a miner. Going forward, the goal is to involve as many pools and miners as possible to test it with different machines.”
Do you know if any mining pools are willing to test the Stratum Benchmarking Tool?
“Yes, we have interested mining pools. DEMAND Pool is the only mining pool entirely based on our SRI project (Stratum V2 Reference Implementation), which is the reference implementation of Stratum V2. DEMAND Pool will certainly be one of the first to test the tool: by demonstrating the greater efficiency of Stratum V2 compared to version 1, it could try to attract miners to its pool.”
What metrics does the tool consider to measure the performance difference between V1 and V2?
“The metrics measured by the tool can be divided into four categories:
- The ratio between valid shares (proofs of work) and invalid shares: this is a very important parameter since mining pools pay a miner based on the number of shares sent to the pool;
- Value extracted from each block template: this metric indicates how many bitcoins (subsidy + fee) are extracted by the miners through the coinbase transaction in the block template they are working on.
Stratum V2 makes the mining process more efficient, saving time and resources. This means that, by using Stratum V2, miners could earn more satoshis. The tool’s document shows some examples where, thanks to this increased efficiency, slightly more satoshis are earned compared to Stratum V1. If transaction fees increase in the future, the difference could become even greater;
- Latency: how long it takes for a miner to start working on a new block. Currently, when a new block is found by the Bitcoin network, the mining pool sends a notification to the miner, who does not have a full node. It takes time for this notification to reach the miner. Since with Stratum V2 the miner has a local node, that time is saved. The time saved is used in the computing operations to find the next block, thus providing an advantage in terms of computing power produced for the miner;
- Bandwidth: another parameter of interest to miners and mining pools is bandwidth usage. If the protocol reduces bandwidth usage, miners and mining pools will be incentivized to adopt that protocol.
What are the advantages that the tool will demonstrate to encourage the adoption of Stratum V2 by mining pools?
“From a purely technical perspective, the key variables are two: latency and bandwidth. So, speed in working on updated blocks and consuming as little bandwidth as possible. Another incentive for mining pools could be to delegate the responsibility of transaction selection to the miners. Although counterintuitive, this aspect may serve as an incentive for the adoption of Stratum V2, given the likely regulatory pressure that will come on mining pools in the coming years to confirm or censor certain transactions. This way, the mining pool shifts the responsibility for transaction selection directly to the individual miner.”
The release of the Stratum Benchmarking Tool marks an important step forward for mining. Stratum V2 represents an improvement over its predecessor. While Stratum V1 centralizes transaction selection in the hands of mining pools, creating potential attack vectors, Stratum V2 decentralizes this aspect, allowing individual miners to create block templates. Additionally, the new protocol improves security and performance through encrypted and binary communication.
