What Is DATUM?

The first DATUM block was mined on 9/30/24:

DATUM stands for Decentralized Alternative Templates for Universal Mining.

The purpose of DATUM is to restore Bitcoin mining to its decentralized roots:

Miners used to create their own block templates before pools.

Nodes acted as both miners and transaction record keepers.

This process was eventually abstracted into two separate entities as hashrate increased.

Pools “pooled” miners' hash rates to give them more frequent and predictable payouts.

This introduced a new problem:

Pools, not miners, began constructing the block templates.

A block template is a blueprint for the next block in the chain.

It contains the list of transactions included in the block, the block reward, and the associated transaction fees.

It is now most common for the pool operators to construct the block template and miners to simply provide a valid hash.

Miners have essentially become hash mercenaries.

The main concern here is centralization.

If a handful of pools can cherry-pick network transactions, they could potentially censor transactions.

This brings us back to square one, as Bitcoin’s main advantage over fiat is the decentralized censorship-resistant use case.

Check out this video to understand the doomsday scenario:

This is the problem DATUM addresses:

“DATUM is designed to prevent this👆, putting the power back into the hands of the individual miners, those running both nodes and mining hardware.”

The idea here is to allow miners to remain part of a pool (benefit from regular payouts) AND allow them to construct their own blocks.

In other words, give each individual miner the option to choose how they fill blockspace.

For example, a nation-state like El Salvador could dedicate its mining resources to support its citizens with lower fees and prioritized access to on-chain transactions.

The solution DATUM presents:

Miners will need to use the DATUM gateway, which communicates directly with the mining hardware and a Bitcoin full node to manage block submissions.

The gateway and full node can exist on the same device.

All of the previous roles of a mining pool have been granted back to the miner, with the exception of the payout split determination.

This allows miners to decide which work to perform, while OCEAN’s pool tracks contributions and reward splits.

DATUM payouts also go directly to miners without custodial oversight.

Ocean is offering DATUM miners a 50% discount on the OCEAN pool fee.

The Github code base for this is not yet available, but Ocean is doing a public beta release on October 18.

If you want to learn more about DATUM, check out their website: https://ocean.xyz/#

If you are interested in pointing your hash to Ocean, contact support@simplemining.io or open a ticket in the Simple Mining dashboard.