Bitcoin Mining Development Mailing List Motivations
Jay Beddict
Hello All,
What is the Bitcoin Mining Developer Mailing List?
In the spirit of the Bitcoin Developer Mailing List, this mailing list will act as a focused public forum to discuss emerging Bitcoin mining technology updates as well as the impacts of Bitcoin-related software or protocol changes on mining.
The expectation is that posts be technical or academic in nature and tailored to a reasonably knowledgeable audience. Content should be thought-out and seeking input on a clear concept or proposal, not vague/exploratory or seeking an answer to a technical question.
What topics can be expected?
Bitcoin mining bridges the physical and the virtual, as such this list will attempt to address a broad set of topics. Example topics include:
Mining Pools
- Stratum
Mempool policy
Firmware
Hardware (ASICs, control boards, PSUs)
Hashrate derivatives
Bitcoin Node software
Any technical topic is fair-game (with the exception of TA of pubco stock prices)
While this email list is open, albeit moderated for spam/abuse, for anyone to post a topic, you may see admins/members posting topics from other sources (with appropriate attribution ideally) to help bring some of these sources more attention and allow for more open discussion.
Why was this created?
Communication within the mining community as well as between the mining community and developer community has been fractured and siloed. Specifically, technical topics like Stratum V2, Braidpool, OP_CAT, great consensus clean up, activation of softforks (BIP8/9 and otherwise), mempool/policy, testnet, etc have been hashed out in various mediums with people documenting deep and thoughtful analysis that will never be seen by the broader mining and/or developer community. Conversely others have made comments that, with no knowledgeable individuals in the conversation to question those comments, resulted in odd assumptions being made and spread widely about the topics and their interaction/impact on mining.
This is not to say that any of those named projects have done a poor job at communicating, but for individuals seeking to learn or participate it may feel overwhelming to have to join another discord, find the right telegram chat, or be on a twitter space outside of their timezone to get the latest on a project or contribute. Further, where these other mediums tend to use a less formal communication style, which makes following concepts/topics and determining context more complex. This mailing list will offer a more formal and long form medium for exploring topics related to mining.
Many thanks to Murch, Mike Schmidt, Steve Lee for spurring this, to Bitcoin Park for fostering the conversations that lead to this, and to Satoshi for giving a glimmer of hope in a raging techno-fascist future.
-Jay Beddict
VP of Research, Foundry