Add support for Smoldot #1141
Description
The current deployment of the miner on WAH and soon on Paseo AH, is relying on internal RPC nodes Parity owns.
They are not bullet-proof and same would be for public nodes if we switch to them of course.
Moreover we rely today on a single RPC node to be alive (we run the miner with --uri wss://xxx option).
It might be worth adding an option to rely on Smoldot instead.
Some benefits might be:
- we don't need to trust any node (even if the gain might be debatable since we currently own the nodes we are running the miner against)
- If we distribute the staking miner binary to others to use, then they might benefit from a mode which uses Smoldot
- If we want to just dogfood Smoldot and put it through its paces a bit then it would help test it to use it in a long-lived-connection setting
It's not a miracle drug since we would add more overhead to everything as pointed out by @jsdw e.g. it needs to get proofs for stuff and gossip to multiple full nodes etc which isn't really beneficial if we trust the RPC node anyways.
The idea would be to add support for it, deploy a miner using Smoldot and check how it goes.
This issue has been created as follow-up of a discussion we had around stalling in the miner with @jsdw , @seadanda , @kianenigma .
Alternative approaches to consider to increase miner's resilience:
- add support for a round-robin pool instead of relying on a single RPC node
- running the miner alongside a local node (as it was in the old staking-miner infra setup)