I do not generally agree with Sztorc, but this critique he put on Twitter gave me pause. I'll admit I am not familiar enough with DATUM, SV2, and pool behavior to be a good judge. Curious how the Stackers would respond.
tl;dr is:
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There's no way to know how many mining pools there actually are.
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We should just focus on making it easy to spin up a new pool, rather than the illusive "decentralized pool".
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DATUM and SV2 can be turned off by pool whenever the pool likes. Miner's only real leverage is point hashrate elsewhere--just as it is now.
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DATUM and SV2 reduce pool operator's accountability: they can join their own pools and submit censored blocks and then claim it's just what their pool members want.
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The only thing that should matter in mining is mining the block with the most fees.
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Sv2 vs DATUM are criticizing each other.
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Miners don't use Sv2 or DATUM.
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Lack of adoption is a bigger threat to bitcoin than miner centralization.