How does the Stratum protocol come into play with mining pools?

[laredotornado]

I"ve come to learn that most major mining pools support the Stratum protocol, so that others can participate in the pool's workload and share the rewards, if any. I've noticed these various open source projects around Stratum, e.g.

https://github.com/pocesar/node-stratum

What I'm curious about is if someone just wants to participate as a member of the pool, why would they need a Stratum server (which is a part of the above link)? Wouldn't they just want the client software to connect to a mining pool? Wouldn't server software only be needed if you were actually running the pool?

Thanks, - Dave

[Chris]

I"ve come to learn that most major mining pools support the Stratum protocol, so that others can participate in the pool's workload and share the rewards, if any. I've noticed these various open source projects around Stratum, e.g.

https://github.com/pocesar/node-stratum

What I'm curious about is if someone just wants to participate as a member of the pool, why would they need a Stratum server (which is a part of the above link)? Wouldn't they just want the client software to connect to a mining pool? Wouldn't server software only be needed if you were actually running the pool?

Thanks, - Dave

Hello Dave, Server is required when someone run a mining pool, client is required by people's in order to open connection with the pool (server) in order to send and receive information, for example minerd -o stratum+tcp://stratumserverpool.com:8333 -u user -p pass (Minerd is the client, client open connection to pool with stratum server wich runs at stratumserverpool.com:8333) and mining start