Pool Requirements

P2Poolv2 is designed to meet the requirements below. Original P2Pool had similar goals but its design didn’t handle coinbase size limitations and didn’t reward orphan blocks. P2Poolv2 scales to more miners and solves the problems with original P2Pool’s design.

Functional Requirements

Nakamoto Consensus: The sharechain uses Nakamoto consensus with nodes reaching eventual consistency on sharechain view.
Reward for All Work: Stale shares are rewarded instead of being orphaned. The original P2Pool did not reward stale blocks and marked them as orphans, denying miners payouts for honest work.
No Centralized Operator: No centralized service is required for accounting or for payout handling.
Permissionless Mining: Anyone can join the pool and start mining without KYC or permission from a trusted third party.
Trustless Joins: New nodes join the pool without trusting any other node. New nodes replicate the sharechain state by trusting the PoW and highest work chain.
Sovereign Templates: All mining nodes build their own templates without approval from anyone. Each node runs a bitcoin node as a block template provider.
Mining on the Current Chain: Miner templates build on the current bitcoin chain; the pool rejects any work on forks that the majority hashrate has not agreed upon. No one can use P2Poolv2 to mine a minority fork of bitcoin.
Precise Hashrate Reporting: All miners see high-precision reporting of their hashrate on their node’s dashboard. The hashrate is derived from the miner’s Stratum shares, not from the miner’s shares that made it to the pool.

Payout Requirements

Unilateral Exits: No entity holds payouts for miners or must sign any transaction before miners take custody of their rewards. Such entities can hold miners hostage if they are required to sign off on rewards.
Payout Commitment at Template Time: The work miners hash commits to the payouts. Miners can verify that the work they are hashing includes their payouts in the correct proportion.
Deterministic, Verifiable Payouts: Payouts are deterministic and are based on the state of the sharechain. All miners recompute the payouts in a received share and verify they match the local sharechain view.
Scalability: The pool supports up to a thousand P2Poolv2 nodes, each serving thousands of ASIC miners, without running into coinbase size limitations.
Small Miner Support: Small miners with tiny payouts can still spend their earnings without requiring third parties to sign transactions.