Stratum v2: After 10 Years, The Most Used Bitcoin Mining Software Gets Facelift

Mark the Stratum v2 release as a victory for the open-source bitcoin community. For a decade, it has been the software of choice for miners to interact with pools and with the bitcoin protocol per se. While still necessary, bitcoin mining pools have a centralizing effect. With Stratum v2, miners will get to construct their own blocks and decide the order of transactions. And that’s just one of the innovations, although the most important one.

The Stratum v2 official website defines itself as “the next generation protocol for pooled mining. It increases security, makes data transfers more efficient, and reduces mining infrastructure requirements. It also introduces three new sub-protocols that let miners select transaction sets and improve decentralization by negotiating with pools.” Not only that, the software is an “independent, community-run, and fully open-source implementation of the SV2 protocol” and it’s “available for pilot testing immediately.”

One giant leap for #bitcoin mining…
The Stratum V2 reference implementation (SRI) is here. This independent, community-run, and fully open-source implementation of the SV2 protocol is available for pilot testing immediately.
— Stratum v2 (@StratumV2) October 11, 2022

Stratum v2 And The Road To Job Negotiation

In this first implementation, users don’t get to construct their own blocks just yet. According to Stratum v2, “This release will be followed by a more robust version in November, allowing miners to select their own work and negotiate with pools through the Job Negotiation protocol. Our SRI Pool code will also be ready by then, letting pools help us test things.”