Stories · as read on the Mining station
The Silent Hand: Vorick on Pool Centralization
David Vorick argues that the Stratum protocol unfairly exposes mining farms to liability, proposing Better Hash to return block selection to the hardware.
Your mining rig, humming away in a data center, may be helping build blocks you never chose. That is the central tension in a debate about who truly controls the Bitcoin network. This argument was captured on stage at Mining Disrupt Miami in 2019, a conference held from July 23 to 25, 2019. The speaker is David Vorick, founder of the ASIC maker Obelisk and lead developer at Sia, who presented a case against the current state of mining pool centralization.
It has been 2,638 days since those words were spoken. At the time, Bitcoin was trading near nine thousand eight hundred dollars. Today it is above eighty-three thousand. Vorick argued that the standard Stratum protocol creates a situation where mining farms become unwitting accomplices.
As Vorick put it, mining pools are a big weak point for decentralization on the network. He noted that while pools provide necessary workload distribution, they also concentrate decision-making power. The protocol allows pools to select which blocks are broadcast, effectively removing that choice from the hardware operators. Vorick pointed out that occasionally pools will cross the line and act maliciously, a risk that harms the entire network.
He recalled a case from 2013, when a large pool used its hash rate against a Bitcoin dice gambling site, and miners answered by moving their machines to other pools until the offender shrank to a sliver of its former size. The mining farm owners, he said, are technically innocent or at best complicit, caught in a system designed to prioritize pool efficiency over miner autonomy. To solve this, Vorick urged miners to push their pools to adopt Better Hash, a protocol designed by Bitcoin Core developer Matt Corallo. The core purpose of mining pools, he argued, is not to pick blocks, but to distribute work efficiently.
By changing the underlying protocol, Vorick suggested, miners could reclaim the right to select their own blocks. This shift would protect hardware from network-level punishment and restore a more democratic structure to block production. The idea is that if miners control block selection, the incentive structure changes, reducing the leverage pools have over individual operators. This was not just a technical suggestion, but a political one, aimed at preserving the decentralized nature of Bitcoin’s security model.
The question he put to the room still stands: should the entity distributing the work also decide the outcome? Vorick’s stance was clear that the answer is no. The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.