Viewing Stratum Data from an ASIC

I'm trying to check out the stratum data that's being exchanged between my ASIC and the mining pool. Anyone know how to do that? This info seems basic but it's surprisingly hard to track down. The only useful thing I've come across is this post: https://this forum.org/index.php?topic=763510.msg8796431#msg8796431 Particularly post #102. But it looks like that only applies to cgminer, right? I don't really need cgminer since I'm just running an ASIC connected to a pool. What I want is to see the stratum data flowing between my S9 and the mining pool. I saw someone mention wireshark before...is that the way to go? What do I need to do to set it up and monitor the stratum data? Thanks for any help!

You should have a look on this topic : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5397166.msg60503248#msg60503248 I am not sure that is what you were looking for, but this is a good example on how you can verify the job done by your Antminer Have a good day !

If you want to see the entire conversation across the network: https://www.wireshark.org/ With this you can see all the packets that come and go and from things on your network. Wireshark also will reassemble the 'conversation' that happens. Obviously, you need to know what you are looking for when reading what is being send to / from your miner but that should get you all the data, you can then decode it. -Dave

A lot of miners have cgminer (or an illegal fork of it) in them. Alas you can't always get at cgminer and change how it runs. As DaveF mentioned above, you can watch the whole conversation between the miner and the pool. Alas one exception, you can't see what braiins is doing ... ...

iwantmyhomepaidwithbtc2: Thanks for the info on that post, looks interesting and verifying payout address is very helpful. DaveF: Sounds like wireshark could be very helpful, however I am not clear on what I would be seeing with the stratum data, would you have any links or anything that would show some examples of how to disseminate this info? I will try it out soon, but without giving it a try at the moment FAFO method I'm just trying to collect some more insight from everyone on how to do this. kano: Interesting, if I think what your saying is correct the ASIC has cgminer or something similar already running onboard.....i am not using braiins. Lol. Is there a way I can tap into the onboard cgminer program to view stratum data? And again, I am just trying to find out how to view the stratum data. Next I need to figure out what I'm looking at. So any help with examples that can demonstrate the breakdown of the comms would be very helpful. Thanks again everyone

Not much to really show, it's just going to be the conversation between your miner and the pool. Pool -> here is what I want you to work on. Miner -> this is what I got so far. The stratum protocol is well documented: https://braiins.com/stratum-v1/docs https://github.com/lclc/stratum-docs/blob/master/protocol-specs.rst that along with what iwantmyhomepaidwithbtc2 posted should give you a more or less complete view of what is happening. There is really not much too it the fact that although what is going on in the miner is somewhat sophisticated the actual conversation between the miner and pool only has basic information. -Dave

Yes that's one the reasons for v2: encrypted communications so precisely, the kind of things you can do with wireshark with v1 which is clear text, cannot be done by your neighbor, your isp, your government, etc with v2. Same reason web pages are now https instead of http, Sure, clear text is great for debugging, in your own lan. Perhaps adequate for a time where you were expected to mine against your own node, But alas, the times have changed. Of course, if you do use bosminer with v1, you can still see it in clear text. Or if you make your own v2 proxy...

You could also use SSL/TLS if you want to have encrypted communication and be certain you are talking to the server you think you are.

Yes, and you can also do a whitelist so those encrypted connections go where they are supposed to.

Nah, I've just written a router that supports TLS, so your entire network is clear text, and all data out from your network is encrypted. I do wonder why someone would promote miners doing encryption/decryption on crappy performance hardware and sending everything as unknown hidden data out to the internet ... Oh right, coz he makes more money if people do what he wants Money changes everything - Cindy Lauper

Well, it turns out the ARM cpus in those control boards are capable enough, except maybe the beagle bone; that one is single core and struggles a bit more for certain tasks but its not an issue with the encryption. The others are dual core and even quad core with the amlogic. Sure, you can also place a v1 to v2 proxy in your network perimeter, so your v1 miners are clear text only in the lan and then go to the pool using v2 Stratum V2 is an open spec, any pool operator can implement it (the lazier ones by putting a v2 to v1 proxy in front), and there is an open independent implementation. You can tell exactly what is going on by yourself from your own mining software talking to your own mining pool. Bitcoin Magazine: Why Bitcoin Mining Needs Stratum V2

Sigh, still trying to trumpet that waste of time. There's nothing new there. GBT existed long ago and died for good reason, trying to resurrect GBT for marketing and calling it v2 is simply that, marketing. The data requirements make it unusable, so as before with GBT, no one ever implemented any transaction bias within miners. ... and what you call v2 is that, transaction bias. Previously called GBT. This issue about risks of pools destroying bitcoin is as ludicrous as saying that miners will destroy bitcoin. The system exists in such a way that it is to the advantage of pools and miners to not alienate themselves from the rest of the network. I will agree that miners in general are indeed stupid, and greed makes them blind. This is clearly apparent by the fact that most mine on pools that risk the bitcoin network on every block change. Your pool does this also. Or I could also point out that they let slide pools like yours ripping off their miners and sweeping it under the carpet as you've done 3 times. Alas that has no effect on bitcoin itself, but on you as happened when you recently lost a massive amount of hash rate. I guess you guys never learn though, coz you lost it before for the same reason. Though probably the fact that you make enough money anyway and recover by deception is the reason why you keep doing it.

Drifting OT a bit here but your neighbor can't do it. Your ISP and government can. Setting up a MITM attack is not that difficult if you have the time and money. At least braiins.com is using DNSSEC, so many pools are not making it much easier to pull off other forms of attacks against the pools. -Dave

You should see the kind of cr*p some "ISP"s do in certain places. Basically putting a bunch of people in the same segment with wide mask and all, so yeah, it can literally be your neighbor playing with wireshark and a nic in promiscuous mode. I also tell people to use dnscrypt-proxy in their lan and point all their devices to it, but alas, not everyone listens. As for Kano, its fine, you don't have to do anything. Others will if they are interested, as you may have noticed, the spec is out there... PS: I'm not the pool, people use it because they like it. Whatever you complain about it, no one cares. Still the stuff from 2015? whatever. If you have a complain, open your ticket like everybody else. Braiins Pool offers no support anywhere else but the pool web page itself. If you are worried about Bitcoin, you should say something about the spam that started polluting the mempool since Feb 6, AND those behind it...

Excuse me for being off topic, but I wonder: I think we all agree here that Ordinals is an abomination for Bitcoin. But am I the only one who thinks that there is a possibility that this is orchestrated by owners of big mining pools? Who are the winners besides these people? Look at the fees on recent blocks: 0.25 BTC, 0.21 BTC, 0.28 BTC... I know in the past there were bigger fees, like block 500500 with  9.993 BTC of fees 5 years ago. But now I don't see how they can go down until this NFT delirium stops. I feel like we are entering a mempool bottleneck, and I have a feeling that the only winners are those who mine multiple blocks a day. I'd love to hear the point of view from people involved in pools, I imagine your perspective must be more fair and more realistic than mine.

Ordinals and the mess they are causing is being discussed here

If you cared you would have read about it yourself, and seen that I've made comments already ...