We've been keeping you freaks abreast of the developments around Stratum V2 since May 2019. We congregate around this dirty part of the Internet today to keep the string of updates alive.

The team at Braiins released this tour de force of a thread on the Internet yesterday aiming to catch people up to speed with the conversation around Stratum V2 to date as well as highlighting what needs to get done to get the massive upgrade to the mining pool layer over the finish line.

The good news is, Stratum V2 has been implemented in Slushpool and in the Braiins firmware miners can use to make their machines more efficient.

The sober reality check; there need to be changes made to Bitcoin Core to make the job negotiation aspect of Stratum V2 possible. This is the biggest benefit of Stratum V2 in terms of making Bitcoin more distributed. By allowing individual miners within a pool to construct their own blocks, the ability of a centralized mining pool operator to censor transactions within a block is eliminated. It also makes it logistically impossible to enforce onerous KYC/AML laws at the mining pool level.

Here's to hoping the conversation around making the necessary changes in Core to give individual miners job negotiation powers begins to pick up. The time to make the mining pool layer of Bitcoin as resilient and robust as possible is right now. Before the entrenched criminals who make the regulations attempt to handcuff the mining industry.

Final thought...

Date night. I smell oysters and martinis in my immediate future.