Mining · solo first, pool optional
Solo mining on the Bloch-SIS-PoW mainnet beta needs no pool: bloch --mine mines standalone, and a found block pays you the whole reward. The pool described here is strictly optional — a piece of reference, non-production software whose only honest purpose is smoothing variance for small miners. It never touches Postern's revenue, and it never sells or lists the coin.
Solo vs pool
Solo mining works standalone. A node started with --mine (see run a node) mines on its own; if it finds a block, you get the entire reward. No pool, no account, no third party.
The pool is optional, and it does exactly one honest thing: it smooths variance. A small miner who would find a solo block once a month can instead earn a proportional slice of every block the pool finds, via PPLNS share accounting. The expected income is the same (minus any pool fee) — only the variance changes. If your hashrate is large enough that solo variance doesn't hurt, solo mine.
The part pool marketing never says
A pool that grows past ~51% of network hashrate is a 51%-attack vector against the very network it serves — regardless of the operator's intentions, it is a single point of coercion, failure, and censorship. On a network this small, that line is uncomfortably close. So, the opposite of pool marketing, on purpose:
The reference daemon prints this warning at startup, the dashboard shows it in a banner, and the dashboard actively estimates the pool's share of network hashrate — escalating into an explicit “move your hashrate elsewhere” warning as it nears the majority line. Forks are asked to keep all three. Do not operate a pool at a scale approaching 51% of the network.
The reference pool
The protocol repository ships a reference pool in its pool/ directory — a standalone cargo workspace, deliberately independent of the node so it can be vendored and forked. It is reference code, unaudited, and not hardened for production — the same honest status as the chain itself. Three binaries:
The pool daemon: SIS-native stratum dialect (the classic Stratum V1 protocol has no field for the 256-coefficient solution vector every Bloch block carries), PPLNS share accounting with a maturity-gated credit lifecycle, a JSONL-journaled restart-surviving ledger, JSON-RPC upstream to a Bloch node, and the honest dashboard.
A reference CPU miner that doubles as runnable protocol documentation. Signs the pool's address-ownership challenge, keeps its nonce cursor across jobs — intentionally a single-connection smoke-test client, not a performance miner.
Shamir 2-of-3 seed-recovery utility for the pool wallet (any 2 shares reconstruct; one alone reveals nothing). Honest label, exactly as the tool prints it: key recovery for disaster resilience — NOT threshold signing.
Two honesty rules are built in. First, share validation is the real consensus verifier, pointed at a softer target — and shares are credited only to an address the connection has proved it controls (a hybrid ML-DSA-65 ‖ Falcon-1024 signature over a per-session challenge, the same scheme as consensus). Second, the accounting never overstates what the pool holds: a found block is recorded pending and credits are booked only once it is canonical at --confirm-depth (default 10); an orphaned block's pending credit is dropped, never booked. Every share and block event is journaled and replayed at startup, so a restart cannot erase owed balances — and an operator cannot “time” restarts to harvest an empty PPLNS window.
One more label worth keeping straight: the PoW is not lattice-hard. Bloch-SIS-PoW is SHAKE-256 cumulative-work hashcash with a Module-SIS structural gate; pool shares are plain hash-difficulty shares, and no lattice bit-security number attaches to any of this.
Running it
Build from the protocol source tree (see run a node for cloning and prerequisites — the repository address is gitlab.com/blochsispow-group/BlochSISPoW-project, rendered as text because the ownerless protocol has no official site). You need a Bloch node with RPC enabled; the pool talks to it over getblocktemplate / submitblock / getblockhash and depends only on two lean protocol crates, not the full node.
cd pool
cargo build --release
cargo testThe pool daemon — every flag spelled out so you change it deliberately:
RUST_LOG=info bloch-pool \
--pool-address bloch1q... # required: where block rewards land
--node-rpc http://127.0.0.1:16210 \
--fee-bps 0 \ # pool fee in basis points; capped at 1000 (10%)
--share-bits 2100ffff \ # compact share difficulty (hex); fixed, no vardiff
--pplns-window 4096 \ # PPLNS window size, in shares
--confirm-depth 10 \ # blocks credit only once canonical at this depth
--journal bloch-pool.journal \ # JSONL ledger journal ("" = memory-only, testing)
--listen 0.0.0.0:3335 \ # miner-facing stratum
--dashboard 127.0.0.1:8650 \ # dashboard HTTP (keep it loopback or proxied)
--refresh-secs 5 \ # template poll interval (well under the 30 s block time)
--coinbase-tag bloch-pool-ref/v0.1
# --no-auth-proof # disable the address-ownership proof (not recommended)And the reference miner, pointed at it:
bloch-pool-miner \
--address bloch1q... # required: your payout address
--auth-seed <hex 32B seed> \ # wallet seed controlling --address (signs the
# pool's ownership challenge; required unless the
# pool runs --no-auth-proof)
--auth-index 0 \ # optional: diversified-address index for the seed
--pool 127.0.0.1:3335 \
--max-shares 0 \ # exit after N accepted shares (0 = forever)
--burst 200000 # candidates per burst between socket pollsNote the default fee is 0% — the fee is an operator setting, not a project revenue stream. Consistent with everything else on this site: no revenue line of this project touches the token.
How to connect
A short terminal walkthrough against the reference deployment at posternpool.com (stratum posternpool.com:3335, dashboard at posternpool.com): create a wallet with bloch-cli newwallet, build bloch-pool-miner, connect with your payout address and your wallet seed as --auth-seed (the pool requires an ownership proof by default — the seed signs a one-time challenge and is never sent), then watch shares land on the dashboard.
bloch --mine) remains the default — don't concentrate hashrate on any single pool, this one included.Custody, stated honestly
Pooled mining unavoidably means the pool address briefly custodies the coinbase until disbursement. Here is the honest state of the art for Bloch, with nothing pretended:
bloch-pool-keyshard splits the pool wallet's seed into 3 Shamir shares (any 2 reconstruct — the field math is the vetted sharks crate, not hand-rolled), one per custodian. This is seed recovery for disaster resilience: at recovery, and at every signing, the seed exists whole in one process on one machine. Run both offline.The honest dashboard
The running daemon serves a self-contained HTML dashboard (no external assets) and the same numbers as JSON at /api/stats. To be clear about what that means: it is a server UI — it exists only where someone is running a pool. The reference deployment at posternpool.com serves one; any other pool's dashboard is whoever runs that pool — verify accordingly, or run your own.
What it shows is exactly what the ledger knows — per-miner shares, confirmed credits, the estimated next-block split, blocks with their pending/confirmed/orphaned status, node-rejected submissions, and the explicit pool take — plus:
Two small honesty details: sat amounts in /api/stats are serialized as strings, because JS numbers lose exactness past 2^53 and an honesty tool must not do approximate arithmetic on debts; and the work-rate figure is labeled candidates/s, not hash/s, because a candidate (seed expansion + SIS residual gate + aux hash) is what it actually measures.
Honest limits
Mainnet beta — unaudited. The relaxed regime (k=4) currently applies — work is trivially forgeable; the k=8 hardening was activated at block 213,000 but reverted and will re-activate with a matched difficulty reduction. Low hashrate → 51%-attackable — which is exactly why this page tells you to spread hashrate, run solo, and never feed a majority pool. The coin is not a security and not an asset — no sale, no listing, no price, no value claim; 17% founder premine disclosed. Use at your own risk — the disclaimer wins.