so in order for my asic to mine to my node i have to run a stratum? ive seen stratum urls many times before but never knew what the reason was or why they were important but it seems that without one you cant connect to a node? am i correct?
GetBlockTemplate is broken with the outdated miners and most of them are not well maintained, the last time I checked. Stratum is a low latency and bandwidth protocol that is used to connect your ASICs to a server which is why it gets recommended more than any other protocol. Antminer doesn't support GBT as well, only Stratum. Your best chance is to run a stratum proxy, which can be done with BFGMiner.