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 stress of the sort that exchanges have additionally needed to cope with: they may very well 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 Various Templates for Common Mining) this weekend. Just like Stratum V2 (applied by Demand Pool), DATUM permits miners (or: “hashers”) to pick out 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 good thing about 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 just a few massive companies —mining swimming pools— in a handful of jurisdictions, than it’s to control many smaller companies and people —hashers— from all over the world.)
After all, the adversarial mindset will acknowledge that this doesn’t in itself remedy the issue of mining centralization in its entirety. Most clearly, draconian lawmakers may in the end simply ban such a pooled mining altogether. Moreover, 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 shortly change if and when there in reality is regulatory stress 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 reducing charges for people who make use of the brand new function.)
Both means, DATUM is a crucial step in the correct path. 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 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 seems to be.
