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So what is Las Vegas Running as opposed to New York. I live closer to Las Vegas so that would seem like the obvious choice and my latency is 48ms while my latency is 63ms to NewYork. If New York is running more up to date code 13.1, would it make sense to point my miners that direction despite the slight increase in latency?
It's all in the public code in git (just thought I'd mention that in case anyone was wondering) but how remote nodes work (and why):
The main pool - in Vegas - generates all work sent to all miners. Always.
Without a node, it does the obvious - sends you new work after a block change or 30 seconds, and when you send shares, it decides if they are stale based on the work vs the current network block (and also a time limit in minutes)
If it's a block, ckpool sends it to a local bitcoind.
Nodes: they run sorta like a proxy with local block submit, but have a trust level, so no one but me can point them at the pool.
What happens is the miner's work from Vegas is sent to the node then forwarded to the miner - just like a passthru proxy.
Thus the work change time, vs directly connecting to Vegas, will depend on the trip time from Vegas to the node then from the node to you - vs your direct trip time to Vegas.
If you are a lot 'closer' to the node, or on the 'other side' of the node, then that's no real loss i.e. no real difference - so that's good.
If your path to Vegas is unreliable or slow, then the nodes path to Vegas may also improve the overall path noticeably.
However, the gain to be had with nodes:
The time you submit your share to the node, is the time Vegas uses to decide if the share is stale or not.
Why? Because the node submits blocks directly to it's local bitcoind (and to the fibre network)
So if your share is a block, it will be submitted immediately, not waiting until it gets back to Vegas.
Thus nodes reduce the stales on submitted shares, if you are closer to the node than to Vegas.
i.e. there's 2 effects. The work change and the share submit.
They can work together to make it better for your mining if you aren't closer to Vegas.
But if you are between Vegas and the node, it can slow down your work change, but speed up your share submit - depending on your ping and internet routing.
What version of bitcoind that is running on the node, has no real effect on why you'd use a node, since nodes don't generate work.