Message from CONVOY founder Luke Dashjr

In 2011, I started the Eligius mining pool.

At the time, GPU mining was just getting started and the difficulty increases made it obvious that miners needed to work together if they were going to have any regularity in payouts. Over the course of that early period we found many blocks (11,631) and helped the community mine a lot of bitcoins (348,326). Eligius was very successful, and had a lot of loyal users who appreciated its unique transparent and non-custodial payout system. Eventually, the pool shut down.

Over the next several years, the centralization and overreach of other pool operators changed Bitcoin to the point where it lost its censorship resistance. So in 2023, I relaunched Eligius as OCEAN. OCEAN's purpose was to take block template construction away from a few pool operators and give it back to the miners, with DATUM letting each miner build their own templates while still sharing rewards with the pool to reduce variance.

Unfortunately, OCEAN came too late, and ultimately failed to achieve its purpose. DATUM worked, and miners could build their own block templates, but few did. Overall, the mining industry had developed a disinterest in Bitcoin itself, and adoption never came.

Then the pools abandoned Bitcoin for a new chain of their own.

Even OCEAN was taken over by the very forces it was meant to supersede. In the end, the pools' attempt to replace Bitcoin failed, and Bitcoin carried on without them.

CONVOY is the successor to both Eligius and OCEAN, and it keeps the original mission: block templates built by miners, not by a few pool operators. Rewards are paid directly to miners by the Bitcoin network itself in generation transactions, payouts are fully transparent, and no pool gets to choose who can use Bitcoin.

A convoy is a group of ships that sail together for protection, while each one stays under its own command. That is what a mining pool should be: miners sharing rewards so payouts are regular, while each miner decides for themselves what they mine in their own blocks.

CONVOY is for bitcoiners who want to keep Bitcoin decentralized. Welcome aboard.