AARON: Ocean’s DATUM Is Tackling Bitcoin’s Most Pressing Problem


Observe Aaron on Nostr or X.

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 risk that these organizations face regulatory stress of the sort that exchanges have additionally needed to cope with: they may very well be compelled 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 (implemented 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 tougher to use regulation. (It’s a lot simpler to manage a number of large companies —mining swimming pools— in a handful of jurisdictions, than it’s to manage many smaller companies and people —hashers— from all over the world.)

In fact, 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 finally simply ban the sort of pooled mining altogether. Apart from, it’s probably not clear that there’s a demand from hashers to assemble their very own blocks within the first place– although that may after all rapidly change if and when there actually 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 chopping charges for those who make use of the brand new function.)

Both manner, DATUM is a crucial step in the best 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 resolve for themselves what transactions they do and don’t need to embody.

The tougher it’s to thwart Bitcoin’s censorship resistance, the brighter Bitcoin’s future seems.



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