Stratum V2 x Cashu: A New Accounting Layer for Hashpower

I’m kicking off The Average Bitcoiner with a deep dive into my Ehash experiment: marrying Stratum V2 pooled‑mining shares with Cashu ecash to create a private, liquid IOU for work-in-progress hashpower. I walk through how mining shares are “almost blocks,” why they’re basically worthless until a payout, and how issuing ehash against validated shares can function like a pool’s accounting database—only open, auditable, and privacy-preserving. We explore the moving parts: locking ehash to an hpub, discovering and redeeming quotes, rotating Cashu keysets on each payout epoch, and why immediate keyset rotation lets mining continue without downtime while the previous epoch settles and melts to sats over Lightning. I also share a status update from the lab: wiring a Bitaxe via ESP‑Miner into a Stratum V2 translator and job declaration client, validating that ehash credits appear, and aiming next at full redemption via CLI before tackling a mobile wallet fork. Along the way, I touch on the broader context—variance smoothing and credit in mining pools, why Cashu (and Fedimint) can bridge to Lightning, the role of Rust, Noise, and keyset expiry, plus some practical dev tooling. The goal: reduce the economic size to bootstrap mining while keeping it permissionless, auditable, and above all, Bitcoin-aligned.'Cashu – Open‑source Ecash': https://cashu.space/'Cashu Documentation (NUTs, wallets, mints)': https://docs.cashu.space/'Fedimint – Federated Ecash for Bitcoin': https://fedimint.org/'Stratum V2 Protocol Specification': https://github.com/stratum-mining/sv2-spec'Stratum V2 Protocol Libraries (SRI)': https://github.com/stratum-mining/stratum'Braiins Pool (formerly Slush Pool)': https://braiins.com/pool'Foundry USA Pool (official)': https://foundrydigital.com/enterprise-software/foundry-usa-pool/'Lightning Network (overview by Lightning Labs)': https://lightning.network/'Noise Protocol Framework': https://www.noiseprotocol.org/'Rust Programming Language': https://rust-lang.org/'Bitaxe – Open‑source Bitcoin Miner': https://bitaxe.org/'ESP‑Miner firmware for Bitaxe (AxeOS)': https://github.com/bitaxeorg/ESP-Miner'mprocs – Run multiple commands in parallel': https://github.com/pvolok/mprocs'Cashu Nutshell – Wallet and Mint (reference implementation)': https://github.com/cashubtc/nutshell