It’s hard to find a more significant threat to Bitcoin’s continued existence than mining consolidation. If—ever—there are only a few mining pools, there is a real chance that these organizations will face the kind of regulatory pressure that exchanges have had to and have faced: they could be forced to include only KYC’ed transactions in blocks. Since audit resistance is arguably the core value proposition, I really doubt that Bitcoin, in this scenario, can have a long-term life at all.
To that end, it was great to see Ocean launch DATUM (Divergent Global Mining Templates) this weekend. Similar to Stratum V2 (developed by Demand Pool), DATUM allows miners (or: “hashers”) to choose the operations they apply to the blocks they receive, while still separating the block reward from other pool users. In other words, hashers get the benefit of pooled mining, without having to give up the choice of transactions to Ocean pool operators, making it very difficult to enforce the law. (It is much easier to control a few big businesses – mining pools – in a few places, than to control many small businesses and individuals – hashers – around the world.)
Of course, a critical thinker will see that this in itself does not solve the mining problem completely. Apparently, draconian lawmakers can finally ban this type of integrated mining altogether. Besides, it’s not really clear that there is a need from hashers to build their own blocks in the first place– although that could change quickly if and when there is in fact regulatory pressure that prevents pools from including certain transactions in blocks. (Ocean is also providing incentives for hashers to choose what they do by cutting off payments for those who use the new feature.)
Either way, DATUM is an important step in the right direction. If nothing else, it should remove many of Ocean’s own worries about refusing to include certain “spam” transactions in their blocks: now all hashers can decide for themselves which transactions they do and don’t want to include.
If it becomes more difficult to prevent Bitcoin censorship resistance, the future of Bitcoin looks bright.