I wish Ocean would not conflate decentralised block construction and Knots.
They are different things
Discussion
Trojan horse, maybe.
I think that is what they are trying to do.
But I think it puts off people who would otherwise be interested in fair payouts and creating their own blocks.
does it matter which node you use for the block template construction?
I don't think so. They have multiple templates (including core).
However when I tried to set up DATUM on Umbrel, it said that it was dependent on Knots???
So I'm not sure
Stratum server builds transactions not node. Node propagates it
new transactions are stored in a node's memory pool while they're waiting to get mined on to the blockchain.
I think the issue is without knots you can't really configure much of your mempool policy
Yeah.
But some people are happy to run Core if they can avoid hashing for Bitmain, right?
Yes but that doesn't really do much to decentralise block template construction assuming bitmain run the standard core mempool settings.
I guess if you hashed for ocean and used one of their options that at least goes some way towards it, but ideally just run a node and datum so you are a miner once again and ocean are just splitting rewards to reduce variance.
Bitmain don't run standard Core.
Using Ocean's standard options is a good compromise. You can literally see the block you are hashing against. https://www.ocean.xyz/blocktemplate/core