Can anyone give me the elevator pitch for Ocean Pool ? I know that people that are already into mining were saying that they don't understand it , so I don't have any hope .
Discussion
Individual miners have more input over the block templates, instead of the pool operator as is typical. More equitable payout structure with fewer intermediaries. At least if what I heard was accurate I suppose that’s the pitch.
I might be wrong but I believe they're the first pool to pay miners out directly from the coinbase transaction, so they never actually take personal custody of the block reward. it goes directly to the miners.
[the caveat to this is miners who have earned less than a given threshold, where paying them an onchain transaction wouldn't make economic sense. my understanding is that they plan to implement lightning soon, so sub threshold payouts can happen over LN, as opposed to on chain].
beyond that, the only requirement they have to mine with them is that you provide a bitcoin address, where payouts should be sent. there's no kyc or any other personal info required.
further, they publish the block template they're working on, upfront, so miners can get a sense of what the final mined block will look like.
in contrast, with other existing pools, my understanding is that in many cases, miners can be working on a block, and have no idea what transactions are to be included in it.
so for example if a miner was strongly in opposition to ordinals, they would have no say in whether or not the work they were contributing would be used to mine (or exclude) ordinals.
[I believe the long term strategy with Ocean (and other pools that implement Stratum V2) is to give miners 100% control over which transactions are included in the block they're working on. This will be a massive win for decentralisation in mining.]
The final caveat to point out, in terms of full disclosure, is that AFAIK, Ocean is currently using Bitcoin Knots as it's reference client, as opposed to Bitcoin Core.
I'm not sure that there are any meaningful diferences between these two clients, in terms of their consensus rules, but might be something to look in to.
Some people are saying this is a bad thing, however it's equally possible to make the case that the choice to mine with Ocean is a voluntary one, and having variation in the base reference clients may actually add to decentralisation, as opposed to detract from it