Read the Overview for General Considerations for Decentralized Mining Pools, or Braidpool Spec in increasing levels of complexity. You may also be interested in our Roadmap

The goals of the pool are:

1. Lower variance for independent miners, even when large miners join the pool.
2. Miners build their own blocks, just like in p2pool.
3. Payouts require a constant size blockspace, independent of the number of miners on the pool.
4. Provide building blocks for enabling a futures market of hash rates.

Braidpool nodes need to connect to a bitcoin RPC node. The bitcoin node also needs to have the hashblock ZMQ notification enabled.

Let's assume there is a bitcoind running on 0.0.0.0:8332 with username xxxx, password yyyy, and zmqpubhashblock enabled on port 28332:

$ bitcoind -rpcport=8332 -rpcuser=xxxx -rpcpassword=yyyy -zmqpubhashblock=tcp://localhost:28332

For the moment, the braidpool node runs a simple p2p broadcast. To run it you need to do the usual cargo things

cd node
cargo build

# run the first seed node on port 8989
cargo run -- --bind=localhost:8989 --bitcoin=0.0.0.0 --rpcport=8332 --rpcuser=xxxx --rpcpass=yyyy --zmqhashblockport=28332

# run other nodes pointing to the seeding node and specify their own port as 9899
cargo run -- --bind=localhost:9899 --addnode=localhost:8989 --bitcoin=0.0.0.0 --rpcport=8332 --rpcuser=xxxx --rpcpass=yyyy --zmqhashblockport=28332

Setting up nix locally for utilizing it from the specific releases check - Nix setup

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf -L https://install.determinate.systems/nix | \
  sh -s -- install

The .nix script present in the root directory /braidpool/cpunet_node.nix contains the CPUnet patched bitcoin-node , can be set up locally as testnet for Braidpool.

# Path to the parent directory
cd /braidpool

# Run the nix-script
nix-build cpunet_node.nix

# Path to the result directory created after successful build
cd result

# Running the CPUnet node
./bin/bitcoind -cpunet -zmqpubsequence=tcp://127.0.0.1:28338

# Creating/loading a corresponding wallet
./bin/bitcoin-cli -cpunet createwallet cpunet

# Load an  wallet created previously
./bin/bitcoin-cli -cpunet loadwallet cpunet

# Generate blocks
./contrib/cpunet/miner --cli=./bin/bitcoin-cli --ongoing --address `./bin/bitcoin-cli -cpunet getnewaddress` --grind-cmd="./bin/bitcoin-util -cpunet -ntasks=1 grind"

The documentation is in the docs/ directory and contains a bunch of math. To view it locally rendered in your browser including the math, use MkDocs:

cd braidpool
mkdocs serve
xdg-open http://localhost:8000

Or you can just click on the docs directory in the code and Github will render the math in these markdown docs.

A visualization dashboard for the Braidpool decentralized mining pool, and Bitcoin related data.

# Navigate to the dashboard directory 
cd dashboard

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Start development server
npm run dev

The dashboard will open automatically at http://localhost:3000.

# Navigate to the dashboard directory 
cd dashboard

# Create optimized build
npm run build

# Preview production build locally
npm run preview

For more details on the Dashboard, checkout its readme file.

A list with TODO's:

• Global simulator for Braids (tests/simulator.py)
• Python braid cohorts() implementation and tests
• Rust braid object handling
• Connect braid algorithms to blocks on CPUNet
• P2P gossip based broadcast of miner blocks and shares.
• Use FROST rust implementation for providing threshold schnorr signatures. Use mock clock for identifying rounds.
• Validate received blocks and shares.
• Single script installer (limited to Linux variants, potentially using docker).

Discord chat