Luke Dashjr and Jack Dorsey’s pool is provoking a healthy debate about “registrations” and the need to further decentralize bitcoin.
Bitcoin in the agora
Filtering transactions containing registrations raises two big questions:
1) Should we accept what increasingly looks like a DoS attack increasing transaction fees and clogging network nodes?
2) Should the pools have control over the selection of transactions?
As a reminder, a pool allows miners to pool their hash production in order to smooth their income. This is a kind of hashrate cooperative.
There are a dozen pools, two of which take the lion’s share. The American Foundry and the Chinese Antpool together control more than 50% of the hashrate. In other words, these two pools choose more than 50% of the transactions inserted into the blocks. The risk of censorship has therefore become aberrant:
This centralization can be undone by forcing pools to implement Stratum V2. This protocol would give back to miners the power to choose transactions themselves.
Ocean plans to implement the Stratum V2 protocol sometime next year. In the meantime, the pool is making people talk by offering to filter transactions containing ordinals and other BRC-20 registrations.
Some see it as a form of censorship and argue that there is no reason to judge the nature of the transactions. Whoever pays the most transaction fees has priority, period.
Others see it as a short-sighted argument. For them, the registrations are a sophisticated attack using social engineering to lure naive people into a ponzian mayonnaise who ultimately pay for a Ddos attack orchestrated by schemers like @udiWertheimer.
At the same time, the debate is also making progress on the question of the centralization of pools.
“A decentralized Bitcoin requires that miners decide which transactions to insert into blocks, not pools. This is Ocean’s ultimate goal. Today we are taking another step towards the decentralization of block construction”says Ocean.
The Luke Dashjr pool now offers several options (multiple block template policies) allowing miners to control the blocks they mine. The three options are:
1) Bitcoin Knots – Recommended (most real financial transactions and least spam).
2) Bitcoin Core with the “Ordisrespector” spam filter.
3) Unmodified Bitcoin Core (like other pools, with fewer financial transactions and the most spam).
In order to encourage its customers to filter registrations, Ocean does not charge any commission for options 1 and 2. Minors choosing option 3 pay a 2% commission.
“Our fees are structured to incentivize miners to make choices that benefit the Bitcoin network in the long term”declares Ocean.
It remains to be seen how long the pool can maintain such incentives. Months ? Years ? For the moment, the hashrate pointed towards ocean is around 500 PH/s, or around 0.1% of the overall hashrate:
Whatever one thinks of the registration filter, the debate has the merit of reminding everyone that the selection of transactions is infiltrated by a handful of pools.
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