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I read the question "I don't understand the "51% attack" problem. Why does a mining pool have power with a 51% share?" and its anwers. That made me wonder that since the GBT protocol is generally not favored by pool operators (currently only one large pool, BTCC, offers it according to Comparison of Mining Pools), would that mean that those miners who mine through STM have given up their rights to choose what kind of block they'd like to mine? I understand that it needs both miners and users to agree with any protocol changes, but

  1. Not all users running full-node clients.
  2. It's possible and probable for large pool operators to gang together and act selfishly.

Since mining difficulty grows steadily solo mining becomes more and more unpractical. Mining pools will eventually take over almost all the hash power. Won't this result a centralized model of mining?

Is there any new protocol other than GBT and STM in the development?

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  • What do you mean by "kind of block"? The only thing that stratum prevents miners from doing is choosing which transactions to include. The rest of the block header can be changed by the miner.
    – Andrew Chow ♦
    Jun 29 '17 at 6:54
  • "There's really only one reason why Stratum is worse than getblocktemplate solution at this time: miners cannot choose Bitcoin transactions on their own. In my experience 99% of real miners don’t care about transaction selection anyway, they just want the highest possible block reward." - slushpool.com/help/manual/stratum-protocol
    – Gary Chen
    Jun 29 '17 at 8:16
  • I've edited your question to give it a more speaking title, retagged it, and tried to improve the text of your question. Please check if I got it right, otherwise feel free to edit it further to adjust it to your liking. :)
    – Murch ♦
    Jul 1 '17 at 20:00

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