It’s troublesome to discover a extra basic risk 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 strain of the type that exchanges have additionally needed to cope with: they could possibly be compelled to solely embrace 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 Different Templates for Common Mining) this weekend. Just like Stratum V2 (carried out by Demand Pool), DATUM permits miners (or: “hashers”) to pick out the transactions they embrace 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 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 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 this kind 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 which may after all shortly change if and when there actually 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 method, DATUM is a crucial step in the suitable course. If nothing else, it ought to take away quite a lot 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 embrace.The harder it’s to thwart Bitcoin’s censorship resistance, the brighter Bitcoin’s future seems to be.
