It’s difficult to find a more fundamental threat to Bitcoin’s continued existence than mining centralization. If —say— there are only a few mining pools, there is a very real possibility that these organizations face regulatory pressure of the kind that exchanges have also had to deal with: they could be forced to only include KYC’ed transactions into blocks. Since censorship resistance is arguably its core value proposition, I seriously doubt that Bitcoin would, in this scenario, have much long-term viability at all.
To that end, it was great to see Ocean launch DATUM (Decentralized Alternative Templates for Universal Mining) this weekend. Similar to Stratum V2 (implemented by Demand Pool), DATUM allows miners (or: “hashers”) to select the transactions they include in the blocks they find, while still splitting the block reward with other users of the pool. In other words, hashers get the benefit of pooled mining, without having to outsource transaction selection to the Ocean pool operators, thus making it more difficult to enforce regulation. (It’s much easier to regulate a few big businesses —mining pools— in a handful of jurisdictions, than it is to regulate many smaller businesses and individuals —hashers— from around the world.)
Of course, the adversarial mindset will recognize that this doesn’t in itself solve the problem of mining centralization in its entirety. Most obviously, draconian lawmakers could ultimately just ban this type of pooled mining altogether. Besides, it’s not really clear that there is a demand from hashers to construct their own blocks in the first place– though that might of course quickly change if and when there in fact is regulatory pressure that stops pools from including certain transactions in blocks. (And Ocean is providing an incentive for hashers to select their own transactions by cutting fees for those that make use of the new feature.)
Either way, DATUM is an important step in the right direction. If nothing else, it should take away a lot of the concerns of Ocean themselves refusing to include certain “spam” transactions in their blocks: now every hasher can decide for themselves what transactions they do and do not want to include.
The more difficult it is to thwart Bitcoin’s censorship resistance, the brighter Bitcoin’s future looks.