Oddbean

Paul Sztorc on a response to a Bitcoin Magazine article about DATUM. The truth is: "1) Mining centralization isn't a real idea and it has never been defined or measured. The supplied measure "number of pools" is utterly meaningless as a single pool can pretend to be multiple pools, undetected. 2) Even if it were a real idea, it is best solved by making it as easy as possible to form a new pool, upon the censorship of too many txns. This *already* would happen naturally -- since censored txns would build up a huge pile of money available to anyone making a non-censored pool. (Note that neither Ocean nor any existing pool will do *this* good-thing-for-Bitcoin, since it is bad for their competitiveness and bottom line.) 3) DATUM and Sv2 are both useless in the same way: the pool can turn them on or off at any time. All Sv2/Datum do, is signal to a client that the pool is disagreeing with them. At this point, your only leverage is to leave the pool. But this is exactly the same leverage that you have today! (The best way to improve the small guy's leverage, by the way, is actually a largeblock drivechain which allows for smaller more frequent pool payouts.) 4) Sv2 and Datum both make a horrible mistake: they reduce **accountability**. For example, when you buy toothpaste or stay at a hotel, you do not democratically vote for how much flouride to put in the toothpaste, nor vote on how late the common areas should be open. A specialist CEO / hotel manager takes *responsibility* for the outcome, since you may not even know what you really want , or why. That is the role played by pools today. Sv2/Datum are terrible because they now allow pools to secretly join themselves with 0.001% pool hashrate and then submit censored blocks. Today this would be a scandal for the pool and people would leave -- it might even kill the pool. But under Sv2 the pool can hide behind the fake excuse "we are just doing what our customers want - this is good for decentralization. 5) In Bitcoin mining (even moreso than in toothpaste), there is an **objectively optimal** block. Everyone on earth should pick the same one -- the one paying the most $$. Everything else is Bad for transparency, bad for pool competition. (It is explicitly MEV, in fact.) But all this is expressly encoureged by DATUM. (!) 6) For what it's worth, the people who actually work on Sv2, have said that the Datum people have misunderstood Sv2, and are inept and failed to understand how to improve upon it. 7) None of the miners want Sv2 or Datum. None of them are interested, except as a PR stunt to pretend to be cooperative . Like the toothpaste example I've given, miners correctly understand that pools should specialize -- miners can keep the pool in line by threatening to leave. 8) The biggest problem for Bitcoin is adoption. If a rival coin out adopts Bitcoin, then BTC will go to $0 a coin and all the Sha256d miners will lose everything. We will be entirely at the mercy of this new coin -- and how "centralized" it's mining is (whatever that will mean). No offense, but this whole thing is a pretext for **ruining** proof of work, and instead inserting Karen-type "regulators" -- parasite middlemen who tell us how we can mine, and whether or not we are mining the "right" way. Pure bull**it. Developers have already harmed Bitcoin enormously with their lies and half-truths (such as that Lightning will work, or that Taproot is useful for anything). This has resulted in 10-year setbacks for BTC. If intellectual standards remain low, Bitcoin will continue to accumulate flaws and then die. A problem far worse than the one mentioned in the article below." The Article: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/aaron-oceans-datum-is-tackling-bitcoins-most-pressing-problem