It’s tough to discover a extra basic risk to Bitcoin’s continued existence than mining centralization. If —say— there are just a few mining swimming pools, there’s a very actual chance that these organizations face regulatory strain of the sort that exchanges have additionally needed to take care of: they might be compelled to solely embody KYC’ed transactions into blocks. Since censorship resistance is arguably its core worth proposition, I severely doubt that Bitcoin would, on this situation, 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 out 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 harder to use regulation. (It’s a lot simpler to manage just a few large companies —mining swimming pools— in a handful of jurisdictions, than it’s to manage many smaller companies and people —hashers— from world wide.)In fact, the adversarial mindset will acknowledge that this doesn’t in itself resolve the issue of mining centralization in its entirety. Most clearly, draconian lawmakers may finally simply ban the sort of pooled mining altogether. Moreover, it’s not likely clear that there’s a demand from hashers to assemble their very own blocks within the first place– although that may after all shortly change if and when there in actual fact is regulatory strain that stops swimming pools from together with sure transactions in blocks. (And Ocean is offering an incentive for hashers to pick out their very own transactions by reducing charges for people who make use of the brand new function.)
Both means, DATUM is a crucial step in the fitting path. If nothing else, it ought to take away a variety 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 wish to embody.The harder it’s to thwart Bitcoin’s censorship resistance, the brighter Bitcoin’s future appears.
