Braiins, the company behind one of the largest bitcoin mining pools, recently released a code spec that could be promising for decentralized mining. The spec, Stratum V2, could significantly change how bitcoin mining functions and would add security and efficiency to mining pools, the entities that organize miners spread across the world. Although it aims to improve bitcoin mining pools in a number of ways, the primary benefit comes from a component that reduces one of the most pressing problems in bitcoin: mining pool centralization. "If this protocol does everything it promises, 'mining centralization' as an ... (full story)