19 Jan 2023 | Updated 10 Mar 2023 [mining] [research]

Rucknium calls out centralized mining pools for unnecessarily delaying XMR transaction confirmations by 60 seconds

Rucknium1 has published a new article2’3 in which he calls out centralized mining pools for unnecessarily delaying XMR transaction confirmations by 60 seconds:

This makes Monero confirmations slower than Litecoin even though Litecoin’s average block time is 2.5 minutes, compared to Monero’s 2 minutes flat. Mining pool operators could solve this issue by adding new transactions to their block templates more frequently, like P2Pool already does.

The researcher recommends mining pools update their block templates at least every 30 seconds, preferably every 10 seconds, if the database operations are not expensive.

Read Rucknium’s complete analysis on his website2 and share your thoughts on Reddit4.

The R scripts that can be used to reproduce the analysis are available in the Monero-TX-Confirm-Delay5 Github repository. Find the data files on rucknium.me/data6.

To support Rucknium’s ongoing research work, you can donate7 XMR, WOW, BCH, or BTC.

This is an ongoing story and the report will be updated when new information is available.

Update 23/1/20: apparently hashvault.pro is now updating their block templates every 20 seconds (down from ~2 minutes)8; moneroocean.stream also updates faster (30 seconds)9’10.

Update 23/3/10: Rucknium confirms XMR transactions now ‘60 seconds faster’11.

  1. https://github.com/Rucknium/ ↩

  2. https://rucknium.me/posts/monero-pool-transaction-delay/ ↩ ↩2

  3. (onion) http://d6ac5qatnyodxisdehb3i4m7edfvtukxzhhtyadbgaxghcxee2xadpid.onion/posts/monero-pool-transaction-delay/ ↩

  4. https://r.nf/10gapp9/ ↩

  5. https://github.com/Rucknium/misc-research/tree/main/Monero-TX-Confirm-Delay/ ↩

  6. https://rucknium.me/data/ ↩

  7. https://rucknium.me/donate/ ↩

  8. https://r.nf/r/Monero/comments/10gapp9/centralized_mining_pools_are_delaying_monero/j52n5uc/?context=3 ↩

  9. https://r.nf/r/MoneroMining/comments/10gb98a/comment/j524qqf/ ↩

  10. https://r.nf/r/Monero/comments/10gapp9/centralized_mining_pools_are_delaying_monero/j53p2v4/ ↩

  11. /rucknium-monero-transaction-confirmations-now-60-seconds-faster/ ↩