Fri Nov 06, 2015 6:04 pm

HI Marshall,



You have an interesting story. What does a typical mining operation look like?



How do miners decide which transactions they mine? Should any of the incentives be split up between the nodes so they are compensated for the network?



Can miners choose to "vote" which version of the Bitcoin code that they operate to use?





Thanks for all the clarity on this.

Tim,Great questions.A typical operation looks like, what I like to call, a beautifully ghetto set up. And the extent of the "Ghetto-ness" depends on which country you are in. Mainland china, one of our operations literally only has 1 full wall. Basically it is a lean-to with 4 MegaWatts of power going to it. Stateside, generally they are a bit more put together, but are nothing more than a modified warehouse for better airflow movement with baker's shelving instead of your typical APC racks.Deciding which transactions to mine is really a binary situation. With a few small exceptions. If we feel like the fee is worth our time, we mine it. Very few people mine zero fee tx's now with the exception being a good friend of mine Luke who runs an operation called Eligius. As far as incentives being split up between the nodes, what I personally would like to see is for people running nodes to set their relay fee appropriately. It really is tough to incentivize people to run a node. But if everybody demanded it, then the network MUST bear it. Additionally, the fees are nominal for miners to have to split that up amongst nodes, then we get into issues similar to net neutrality and so-called fast lanes. Nobody really has time for that debate currently.Currently, miners can choose AND actually do use whatever version of bitcoin they want. Only a few things are enforced like which block version and mission critical updates force people to upgrade. Like Peter Todd's BIP66.