Stratum Mining Block Headers - A Worked Example

Anybody spending any significant amount of time on the internet lately knows that tulip bulbs, er, I mean, cryptocurrencies are a hot topic. As such, it seems like there are a lot of projects out there looking to implement related technologies.

Stratum mining is one of those technologies. It is currently the in-vogue replacement for the older 'get-work' protocol, and everyone seems to want to write their own implementation. Unfortunately, the official documentation is severely lacking in any kind of worked example, a weakness I hope to rectify here.

This is not intended be a complete document on the ins and outs of the communication aspect of Stratum, that is something I feel like the official documentation does well. This is merely intended to show a worked example of generating a block header based on information provided to a Stratum client by a Stratum server. Think of  it as the 'back of the book' answer for a homework problem. Also note, this is for a Scrypt based coin, though the process should be the same for double SHA-256 based currencies.

If it helps you, you can send me a Bitcoin tip so maybe I can afford the fancy ramen this week: 18ymUR1XyZ68NCzjrzYtMRP2ztk8LjAgBL

Compiling CudaMiner on Fedora 20

Are you interested in getting into the scrypt based cryptocurrency mining game, but only have a lowly Nvidia card? Lucky for you, it is entirely possible to mine scrypt based coins (eg. Litecoin, Feathercoin) using an Nvidia GPU. CudaMiner makes it possible.