It’s troublesome 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 take care of: they may very well be compelled to solely embrace 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 Various 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 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 huge companies —mining swimming pools— in a handful of jurisdictions, than it’s to control many smaller companies and people —hashers— from world wide.)In fact, the adversarial mindset will acknowledge that this doesn’t in itself remedy the issue of mining centralization in its entirety. Most clearly, draconian lawmakers might 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 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 chopping charges for those who make use of the brand new function.)
Both means, DATUM is a crucial step in the fitting route. If nothing else, it ought to take away lots 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 seems to be.
