It’s troublesome to discover a extra elementary 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 stress 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 Various Templates for Common Mining) this weekend. Much like Stratum V2 (carried out 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 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 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 clear up the issue of mining centralization in its entirety. Most clearly, draconian lawmakers might in the end simply ban this kind of pooled mining altogether. In addition to, it’s not likely clear that there’s a demand from hashers to assemble their very own blocks within the first place– although which may in fact rapidly change if and when there in truth 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 slicing charges for those who make use of the brand new function.)
Both manner, DATUM is a crucial step in the fitting route. If nothing else, it ought to take away numerous the considerations 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 need to embody.
The harder it’s to thwart Bitcoin’s censorship resistance, the brighter Bitcoin’s future appears to be like.
