Today, DMND and RootstockLabs announced the rollout of new features aimed at increasing the decentralization of Bitcoin mining. This new feature uses Stratum V2 to enable pool miners engaged in building their own block templates to also handle the selection and inclusion of merged-mined block commitments from the Rootstock (RSK) sidechain.
Merge mining is a process where multiple blockchains can share or “reuse” the same POW from the same set of miners. One blockchain, the child chain, structures its block headers to include the parent chain’s header. This means that the hash of the child chain’s block header is actually contained within the parent chain block (usually within a Coinbase transaction), and the child chain’s software knows this and actually verifies some of the parent chain’s blocks in the process of validating the child chain’s blocks.
This allows miners on the parent chain to mine multiple blockchains at once by simply including block header commitments in their Coinbase transactions and mining blocks on the parent blockchain. If one is found in the parent chain, one will also be found in all child chains.
The DMND integration will allow miners to claim sidechain rewards in sBTC (a root stock Bitcoin-backed token, the reserves of which are managed by the federation that operates the sidechain) directly on the sidechain without revenue sharing or intermediate pool storage.
Although such dynamics may actually have an adverse effect on decentralization, it is nevertheless an important development that actually tests such questions in the real world.
Alejandro de la Torre, CEO and co-founder of DMND, said: “Miners manage merge mining, and miners receive compensation in exchange for merge mining. Strengthening the delegation of control to miners is an important support for achieving further decentralization of the Bitcoin ecosystem.”
This article, DMND and RootstockLabs Partners Bring Stratum V2 to Merge Mining, originally appeared in Bitcoin Magazine and was written by Shinobi.
