It’s tough to discover a extra basic menace to Bitcoin’s continued existence than mining centralization. If —say— there are only some mining swimming pools, there’s a very actual risk that these organizations face regulatory stress of the sort that exchanges have additionally needed to take care of: they could possibly be compelled to solely embody KYC’ed transactions into blocks. Since censorship resistance is arguably its core worth proposition, I significantly doubt that Bitcoin would, on this state of affairs, have a lot long-term viability in any respect.
To that finish, it was nice to see Ocean launch DATUM (Decentralized Various Templates for Common Mining) this weekend. Much like Stratum V2 (applied by Demand Pool), DATUM permits miners (or: “hashers”) to pick the transactions they embody within the blocks they discover, whereas nonetheless splitting the block reward with different customers of the pool. In different phrases, hashers get the advantage of pooled mining, with out having to outsource transaction choice to the Ocean pool operators, thus making it tougher to use regulation. (It’s a lot simpler to manage a couple of massive companies —mining swimming pools— in a handful of jurisdictions, than it’s to manage many smaller companies and people —hashers— from all over the world.)
After all, the adversarial mindset will acknowledge that this doesn’t in itself clear up the issue of mining centralization in its entirety. Most clearly, draconian lawmakers might in the end simply ban the sort of pooled mining altogether. In addition to, it’s not likely clear that there’s a demand from hashers to assemble their very own blocks within the first place– although which may after all rapidly change if and when there in truth is regulatory stress that stops swimming pools from together with sure transactions in blocks. (And Ocean is offering an incentive for hashers to pick their very own transactions by reducing charges for people who make use of the brand new function.)
Both means, DATUM is a vital step in the correct course. If nothing else, it ought to take away lots of the considerations of Ocean themselves refusing to incorporate sure “spam” transactions of their blocks: now each hasher can resolve for themselves what transactions they do and don’t need to embody.
The tougher it’s to thwart Bitcoin’s censorship resistance, the brighter Bitcoin’s future appears to be like.
