today Demand and RootstockLabs Announcing the launch of a new feature aimed at enhancing decentralization in Bitcoin mining. The new feature uses Stratum V2 to enable pool miners to co-create their own block template to also handle the selection and inclusion of merge-mined block commits from the Rootstock (RSK) sidechain as well.
Merged mining is a process by which multiple blockchains can share or “reuse” the same POW from the same pool of miners. One block, the subchain, constructs its block heads to include those of the parent chain, i.e. the hash of the block header of the subchain is actually included within the block of the parent chain (usually in a coinbase transaction), and the subchain software is aware of this, and actually verifies the validity of a portion of the parent chain’s blocks in the process of validating the subchain’s blocks.
This allows parent chain miners to mine multiple blockchains simultaneously simply by including block header commits in their coinbase transactions, and then mining the blocks of the parent blockchain. When one is found for the parent string, one is found for all child strings as well.
The DMND integration allows miners to claim sidechain rewards in rBTC (a Bitcoin-backed Rootstock token whose reserves are managed by the consortium running the sidechain) directly on the sidechain, without revenue sharing or intermediary pool custody.
There is potential for such a dynamic to exist in reality The opposite effect on decentralizationHowever, it is an important development that will put such questions to the test in the real world.
“The miner controls the embedded mining and the miner gets paid for the embedded mining,” said Alejandro de la Torre, CEO and co-founder of DMND. “More delegation of control to miners is our key support for further decentralization of the Bitcoin ecosystem.”
