A big milestone for AtlasPool. Our first four endpoints — Ashburn, Portland, Frankfurt, and Hong Kong — are now running our newest build, and the early results on
stratumrace.com are incredibly promising. Over the past 24 hours AtlasPool has won roughly 4 out of 5 block notification races against 25+ monitored pools.
This build is the culmination of a lot of research and hard work chasing one goal: the most performant Bitcoin pool available to miners. Without going too deep into the weeds, it pairs the latest Bitcoin Core and ckpool with our own self-built tooling to squeeze out every last drop of performance, all running on blazing-fast AWS Graviton EC2 instances placed in some of the most interconnected locations in the world.
It's been a real learning journey, and I'd be remiss not to thank a few people who helped along the way:
@ProofOfMike — whose idea and early work measuring block notification speed eventually grew into
stratumrace.com, and who's been a great sounding board for ways to improve the pool.
@philip_dath — who has worked with me on a range of performance improvements across both the node and the stratum server. We're still at it today, and I really appreciate his expertise and his friendly attitude.
Aviral at
@Altair_tech — who understood AtlasPool from our very first conversation, and has supported the pool with important introductions, giveaways, and no shortage of encouraging words.
@mutatrum — a longtime friend of the pool and a valuable technical sounding board, who helped pin down a few bugs. An all-around good dude.
@WantClue — First person to interview me for a podcast and also added AtlasPool to the BitForge Nano firmware. And last but not least,
Con Kolivas (CK) — whose awesome stratum server implementation is the bedrock of AtlasPool.
A huge thank-you as well to our AtlasPool Discord crew, who keep the pool going with hashing, humor, and expertise: metaprinter (our first moderator, GZR, Travetown, RBX (first Aussie on the pool!), Beckels, Happy Day, Jeebz, BlackHole, proandres6 (biggest share so far at 66T), Mr. KV3 (we miss you!), Blockdyor (who wrote the first AtlasPool review), and many more.
And a thank-you to DTV Electronics and the South African Bitcoin community for the sponsorship that helps power our London and Cape Town endpoints. If anyone else out there would be interested in sponsoring an endpoint, I'd love to hear from you.
I'll be honest: it's a little disappointing that after nearly a year of operation AtlasPool hasn't found a block yet. But every one of these improvements shortens the odds, and I believe that moment is coming soon. Until then, I'll keep building and operating the most performant and reliable Bitcoin pool I can.
Onward. 🧡