OCEAN on Nostr: OCEAN. It’s been up and running for just over a week. Our miners are elated that ...

OCEAN. It’s been up and running for just over a week. Our miners are elated that we’re finding blocks ahead of schedule and they’re getting paid above market returns. We are on a path to decentralization. This is a big step forward in how mining pools operate in #Bitcoin.

Our transparency model is working and provoking important discussions. For the first time in years, Bitcoin miners can see in real-time the underlying candidate block that they are committing their hashrate to BEFORE they do the work.

Our non-custodial model is distinguishing us from incumbent pools, and government regulators are now further away from our miners’ coins than they are with custodial pools. Over time, our TIDES payout system will ensure that dozens more miners receive bitcoins directly from the Bitcoin network instead of just a few centralized pool operators.

Decentralization does not happen overnight, but we are taking important steps in the right direction, ultimately putting miners back in control of the intelligent parts of mining via decentralized block template construction. We are working hard to make this a reality, and we owe our supporters and miners a sincere word of thanks for joining us early on in this journey.

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nevent1q…w35h

The OP_RETURN discussion is not new and dates back to 2014 when Bitcoin Core 0.9.0 was released with the OP_RETURN policy included which was intended to discourage more egregious forms of spam. At that time, 40 bytes was the default max datacarriersize limit across all node implementations; this was and still is sufficiently large for tying data to a transaction (32 bytes for a hash and 8 bytes for a unique identifier). Core subsequently increasing the default to 80 bytes was an entirely voluntary decision and in no way contradicts the design objective that OP_RETURN creates a provably-prunable output to minimise damage caused by data storage schemes, which have always been discouraged as abusive. There are also other good technical reasons which I have chosen to retain the lower default in Bitcoin Knots, and no justification for increasing it.

It is not my intention, nor that of my team at
OCEAN (npub1qtv…7dze), to filter coinjoins. These present an innovative tool for increasing Bitcoin’s privacy and, when constructed properly, coinjoins can easily stay within the OP_RETURN limit (indeed, there is no reason for them to have *any* OP_RETURN data at all). I have some ideas on how to alleviate the recent issue where some coinjoin transactions were flagged as spam from Knots v25, and I am willing, with the full resources of my team, to work collaboratively on a solution in good faith.

Bitcoin does and always has allowed nodes to set filters based on multiple sets of criteria and Knots v25’s defaults are IMO what is best for Bitcoin at this time. Others may disagree and that is ok. They are free to (and should) run their own nodes - it is good for Bitcoin to have more people running nodes, including miners, and there should be a natural diversity in node policies. As was stated before, OCEAN is on a path to decentralization and very soon we are going to be in a position where hashers will be able to fully participate as miners and perform the intelligent parts of mining such as deciding which version of node software to run and what filters or other policies to apply to block template construction.