Bitcoin Mining Pools

Mining pools definition used on: https://bchexplorer.cash/mining/pools

Contributing

Contributions welcome! All changes must be applied in pools-v2.json file.

Adding a new mining pool

Adding a new mining pool is done by extending the pools-v2.json file. It is important to give it an unique ID (id key).

And run: ./dupes.sh script to validate that there are no duplicates.

Note: The pool name will automatically becomes the slug (eg. https://bchexplorer.cash/mining/pool/viabtc (here viabtc is the slug).

New mining pool (detailed explanation)

You can add a new mining pool by specifying the coinbase tag they're using in the coinbase transaction.

To add a new pool, you must add a new JSON object (see example below) at the bottom of the existing pools-v2.json JSON array.

Note that you can add multiple tags (type array) for the same mining pool. Same for addresses (optional). For example:

{
  "id": 6,
  "name": "BTC.com",
  "addresses": [
    "bitcoincash:qpv5y82t8z7n6w80fpm64afah7ntptxue59h5cdsn2"
  ],
  "tags": ["/BTC.COM/", "/BTC.com/", "btccom"],
  "link": "https://pool.btc.com"
},

---

Each coinbase tag will be use as a regex to match blocks with their mining pool. This is how we use it in BCH Explorer application. You can see the code here.

const regexes: string[] =
  typeof pools[i].regexes === "string"
    ? JSON.parse(pools[i].regexes)
    : pools[i].regexes;
for (let y = 0; y < regexes.length; ++y) {
  const regex = new RegExp(regexes[y], "i");
  const match = asciiScriptSig.match(regex);
  if (match !== null) {
    return pools[i];
  }
}

Each address will be use to match blocks with their mining pool by matching the coinbase transaction output address. This is how we use it in BCH Explorer application. You can see the code here.

const poolAddresses: string[] =
  typeof pools[i].addresses === "string"
    ? JSON.parse(pools[i].addresses)
    : pools[i].addresses;
for (let y = 0; y < poolAddresses.length; y++) {
  if (addresses.indexOf(poolAddresses[y]) !== -1) {
    return pools[i];
  }
}

Change an existing mining pool

For example, to rename BTC.com to BTC you'd need to update the following (using today's pools-v2.json as reference):

// Original
{
  "id": 6,
  "name": "BTC.com",
  "addresses": [
    "bitcoincash:qpv5y82t8z7n6w80fpm64afah7ntptxue59h5cdsn2"
  ],
  "tags": ["/BTC.COM/", "/BTC.com/", "btccom"],
  "link": "https://pool.btc.com"
},
// Renamed
{
  "id": 6,
  "name": "BTC",
  "addresses": [
    "bitcoincash:qpv5y82t8z7n6w80fpm64afah7ntptxue59h5cdsn2"
  ],
  "tags": ["/BTC.COM/", "/BTC.com/", "btccom"],
  "link": "https://pool.btc.com"
},

Block re-indexing

When a mining pool's coinbase tag or addresses is updated in pools-v2.jon, BCH Explorer can automatically re-index the appropriate blocks in order to re-assign them to the correct mining pool.

"Appropriate" blocks here concern all blocks which are not yet assigned to a mining pool (unknown pool), from block 130635 (first known mining pool block) as well as all blocks from the update mining pool. You can find the re-indexing logic here

You can enable/disable this behavior using by setting the following backend configuration variable:

{
  "EXPLORER": {
    "AUTOMATIC_POOLS_UPDATE": false
  }
}

If you set it to false, no re-indexing will happen automatically, but this also means that you will need to delete blocks manually from your database. Upon restarting your backend, missing indexed blocks are always be re-indexed using the latest mining pool data.

Mining pool definition

When the BCH Explorer backend (re)starts, we automatically fetch the latest pools-v2.json version from github. By default the url points to https://gitlab.melroy.org/bitcoincash/mining-pools/-/raw/main/pools-v2.json but you can configure it to points to another repo by setting the following backend variables:

{
  "EXPLORER": {
    "POOLS_JSON_URL": "https://gitlab.melroy.org/bitcoincash/mining-pools/-/raw/main/pools-v2.json",
    "POOLS_JSON_TREE_URL": "https://gitlab.melroy.org/api/v4/projects/199/repository/tree"
  }
}