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 chance that these organizations face regulatory strain of the sort that exchanges have additionally needed to take care of: they may very well be pressured to solely embody 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 Different Templates for Common Mining) this weekend. Just 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 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 around the globe.)
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 one of these 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 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 people who make use of the brand new function.)
Both means, DATUM is a vital step in the appropriate course. If nothing else, it ought to take away a number 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 embody.
The harder it’s to thwart Bitcoin’s censorship resistance, the brighter Bitcoin’s future appears.
