Other pools are essentially borrowing your hashpower. The pool operators make all decisions, build the block, and recieve the rewards. They divvy out to the "miners" (more appropriately shld be named hash lenders) as they see fit based on the pool rules they decide.

Ocean allegedly does not custody the rewards. They are sent firectly to your bitcoin address. They are do not borrow your hash but instead you are split a proportional amount of rewards based on your real-time hash rate (not a moving average) directly from the coinbase. Stratum v2 gives miners (more appropriately named in this case) the ability to select transactions and take that decision away from the pool operators.

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Thanks you said this more clearly than I could.

To be clear the decentralizing aspect is that in the legacy pool setup, you're simply lending hashpower. The pool operators are mining and provide you a payout after the fact for your efforts based on their distribution rules. With only a few major pools, that's centralized.

In the ocean model, each "miner" is in fact mining. It is one pool but the operators are not necessarily making all the mining decisions. Rewards are never centrally custodied and individual miners can select different transactions tho I presume the actual worker that mines the block ultimately builds the block.

Maybe it's not perfect but it's a step in a better direction.

I don’t disagree with any of these points.

But that’s the part I’m struggling to understand.

How are individual miners “selecting” transactions… collectively?

Ultimately someone is making the decision. Right? Who is making the decision?

Read up on how stratum v2 works.

Now I could be wrong here but my understanding is that Ocean will preselected a set of transactions which everyone can see ahead of time. But the nature of the stratum v2 protocol allows for individual miners to select their own transactions or modify the pools preselected default. My assumption is if your specific machine guesses the nonce, it is your set of transactions that ultimately gets mined.

https://stratumprotocol.org/

Thanks

I'm not entirely versed on all this so please let me know if you see anything that contradicts what I've said!!!

This is way beyond my knowledge. So I need to do a lot of reading.