It is difficult to find a more fundamental threat to the continued existence of bitcoin than mining centralization. If, say, there are only a few mining pools, there is a very real possibility that these organizations will face regulatory pressure of the kind that exchanges have also had to face: they could be forced to include only KYC transactions in blocks. Given that censorship resistance is arguably its core value proposition, I seriously doubt that bitcoin, in this scenario, has much long-term viability.
For that reason, 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 in the pool. In other words, hashers get the benefit of pool mining, without having to outsource transaction selection to Ocean Pool operators, making regulation difficult to enforce. (It is much easier to regulate a few large companies (mining pools) in a handful of jurisdictions, than it is to regulate many smaller companies and individuals (hashers) around the world.)
Of course, the adversarial mentality will recognize that this alone does not solve the problem of mining centralization in its entirety. Most obviously, draconian lawmakers could ultimately ban this type of pooled mining entirely. Furthermore, it's not really clear that there is a demand for hashers to build their own blocks in the first place, although that could of course change quickly if there is indeed regulatory pressure preventing pools from including certain transactions in blocks. (And Ocean offers an incentive for hashers to select their own transactions by reducing fees for those who use the new feature.)
Either way, DATUM is an important step in the right direction. At the very least, it should eliminate many of the concerns that Ocean itself refuses to include certain “spam” transactions in its blocks: now each hasher can decide for itself which transactions it does and does not want to include.
The harder it is to thwart bitcoin's censorship resistance, the brighter bitcoin's future looks.
