It’s tough 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 sort that exchanges have additionally needed to cope with: they may very well be pressured 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 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 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 harder to use regulation. (It’s a lot simpler to control a couple of large companies —mining swimming pools— in a handful of jurisdictions, than it’s to control many smaller companies and people —hashers— from world wide.)
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 any such pooled mining altogether. Moreover, it’s probably not clear that there’s a demand from hashers to assemble their very own blocks within the first place– although which may in fact shortly change if and when there in truth 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 slicing charges for people who make use of the brand new characteristic.)
Both means, DATUM is a crucial step in the proper path. If nothing else, it ought to take away quite a lot of the issues of Ocean themselves refusing to incorporate sure “spam” transactions of their blocks: now each hasher can determine for themselves what transactions they do and don’t wish to embrace.
The harder it’s to thwart Bitcoin’s censorship resistance, the brighter Bitcoin’s future appears.