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 type that exchanges have additionally needed to cope with: they might be compelled to solely embody KYC’ed transactions into blocks. Since censorship resistance is arguably its core worth proposition, I critically 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 (carried out 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 good thing about pooled mining, with out having to outsource transaction choice to the Ocean pool operators, thus making it harder to implement regulation. (It’s a lot simpler to control a couple of massive companies —mining swimming pools— in a handful of jurisdictions, than it’s to control many smaller companies and people —hashers— from all over the world.)
After all, the adversarial mindset will acknowledge that this doesn’t in itself resolve the issue of mining centralization in its entirety. Most clearly, draconian lawmakers might finally 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 that may after all shortly change if and when there the truth is 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 chopping charges for people who make use of the brand new characteristic.)
Both manner, DATUM is a vital step in the precise path. If nothing else, it ought to take away a variety of the issues 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 harder it’s to thwart Bitcoin’s censorship resistance, the brighter Bitcoin’s future appears to be like.
