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 pressured 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 situation, 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. 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 control a number of large companies —mining swimming pools— in a handful of jurisdictions, than it’s to control many smaller companies and people —hashers— from around the globe.)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 in the end simply ban this sort of pooled mining altogether. In addition to, it’s probably not 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 their very own transactions by reducing charges for those who make use of the brand new function.)
Both approach, DATUM is a vital step in the best course. If nothing else, it ought to take away numerous 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 tougher it’s to thwart Bitcoin’s censorship resistance, the brighter Bitcoin’s future appears to be like.
