Dikaios1517 on Nostr: Thank you! I appreciate that encouragement! Let me see if I can answer the particular ...

Thank you! I appreciate that encouragement!

Let me see if I can answer the particular questions you had, and then I will think about writing something long-form on the subject.

There are a few different types of pools now. Your bog-standard mining pool, like Braiins, Luxor, or F2Pool, allow individual miners to point their hashrate at the pool's stratum server, so that the pool is determining which transactions are included in the blocks found by any miner in the pool. Additionally, they don't pay the miners in the pool directly from the block rewards. Instead, the block reward goes 100% to the pool, and they credit each miner's account held at the pool based on the proportion of hashrate they are contributing to the effort of finding a block.

Worse than that, though, a handful of these pool operators aren't even constructing the block templates they send to miners on their pool. Instead, they are just using the same block template as AntPool. Meaning that AntPool has an even more outsized influence on which transactions make it into blocks than their pool's hashrate alone suggests.

What is more, most of them use the FPPS payout method, which means they credit their miners accounts on a set schedule, regardless of whether the pool finds a block. This means they need to have plenty of Bitcoin set aside for times when they get unlucky and the pool doesn't find any blocks, but they still need to credit the miners.

There are other mining pools which only credit the miners' accounts when the pool actually finds a block, but those are becoming few and far between these days.

These pools also typically have a minimum amount you need to accumulate in your account (e.g. at least 100k sats) with the pool before they will allow you to withdraw. The exception would be Braiins, since you can auto-withdraw via Lightning even very small amounts. This can create pool lock-in, since miners won't want to switch pools if they still have a ways to go before they earn enough sats to withdraw.

Next we have the lottery pools, like Public Pool or Solo CKPool. They are similar to the other pools previously mentioned in that you point your miner's hashrate at THEIR stratum server, so they are controlling which transactions end up in a block by creating the block template for you. However, if your miner finds the block, you will be the only one on the pool to receive the block reward (minus pool fees). Conversely, if someone else on the pool finds a block, you get nothing.

Then there's OCEAN. When they started, the only option was to point your miner's hashrate at their stratum server, so they 100% dictated which transactions made it into blocks, just like all the other pools, but what differentiated them was that the block reward didn't go to the pool to then be credited to miners' accounts. Instead, miners with enough hashrate were paid DIRECTLY within the block. Those without enough hashrate to justify the creation of a UTXO still had to wait until they accumulated enough to get a payout, though.

Then OCEAN allowed miners to pick between a few different block templates, based on how strictly they wanted to filter out spam from any block they found, or even choose not to filter at all. This in itself had never been done before by a pool that I am aware of.

They also added the option to receive payouts via Lightning. So now the bigger miners could receive on-chain payouts directly from the block reward, and the small fries, like me, could get paid immediately via Lightning, even if it was just 40 sats at a time.

That still wasn't good enough for OCEAN, though. They didn't want to be in control of which transactions make it into a block AT ALL. Not even by offering a few different options to choose from. They wanted each miner to be able to create their own block templates using their own node's mempool data. This was the promise made to us by those developing Stratum V2, but it was taking a while for that protocol to be ready, so OCEAN created DATUM. Now the only thing that OCEAN has to do is send the miners the reward split for them to include in their blocks, and if they find a block, they don't have to send anything to the pool. They just use their node to broadcast the block they found, with the reward split to the other OCEAN miners, to the rest of the network directly.

Finally, DATUM has enabled those who want to lottery mine to cut out the need for connecting to a pool at all. Instead, they just connect to their DATUM server, which gets transaction data from their mempool to include in the block, and sends the block reward directly to their Bitcoin address, should they find a block. Of course, because they are not contributing to the efforts of a pool, and are giving themselves the full reward, they also get no reward at all in the much greater likelihood that they never find a block. But then, that's why it's called lottery mining, right?

There's also a new pool on the scene, finally using Stratum V2 to allow miners to construct their own block templates (I think), called DMND pool. Going to have to do some research to see exactly how this compares to the way DATUM works on OCEAN.

As far as your second question, the difficulty your miner is capable of achieving and its hashrate are not connected to one another. A 20TH machine will find very low difficulty hashes and very high difficulty hashes, and if they find a high enough difficulty hash before any other miner does, they find a block. Same with a 1TH BitAxe. Some pools just won't give you any credit for hashes below a certain difficulty. The more hashrate you have, the more hashes you will find that meet that requirement, but it should still be pretty proportional, so a 20TH machine will find 20x the hashes that meet the minimum difficulty as a 1TH BitAxe.

The only viable pools to use a BitAxe with, though, are going to be ones that pay out via Lightning, or lottery pools, where you only get paid if your BitAxe happens to find a block. That is due to the amount of sats you need to earn to meet minimum withdrawal restrictions for on-chain payouts, though, and nothing to do with the BitAxe's ability to generate hashes with sufficient difficulty.

Now that I have answered both those questions, all of the above could probably just be a long-form note. 😂