It’s tough to discover a extra elementary menace to Bitcoin’s continued existence than mining centralization. If —say— there are just a few mining swimming pools, there’s a very actual risk that these organizations face regulatory stress of the sort that exchanges have additionally needed to cope with: they could possibly be pressured 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 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 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 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 just a few huge 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 clear up the issue of mining centralization in its entirety. Most clearly, draconian lawmakers may in the end simply ban such a pooled mining altogether. Apart from, 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 in fact rapidly change if and when there in actual fact 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 chopping charges for those who make use of the brand new characteristic.)
Both manner, DATUM is a vital step in the suitable course. 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 wish to embrace.The tougher it’s to thwart Bitcoin’s censorship resistance, the brighter Bitcoin’s future appears to be like.
