The new OCEAN mining pool created by Luke Dashjr and Jack Dorsey is in the eye of the Bitcoin community because it is not decentralized and censorship is the order of the day.
OCEAN is a project that has recently been presented to the Bitcoin community as an “innovative decentralized Bitcoin mining pool.” A pool that has been created with the aim of providing greater autonomy and transparency to miners.
This project is being driven by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter (now X), and Luke Dashjr, a prominent and controversial Bitcoin developer. Their goal? To revolutionize the mining ecosystem by removing interference from centralized entities and distributing block rewards directly to miners.
It is certainly a good initiative that has already received an initial investment of 6,2 million dollars and has generated great enthusiasm and debate in the Bitcoin community. But how true is all this? What is the story behind OCEAN?
«Decentralizing Bitcoin Mining»
Before we delve into the history of OCEAN, let’s first get to know the project. The main motive behind the creation of OCEAN is to “decentralize mining.” The intention is that through this mining pool, miners can maintain full control over their rewards and contribute to the security and stability of the Bitcoin network. To do so, OCEAN uses a fair reward distribution algorithm, meaning that each miner receives a fair share of the rewards generated.
At the same time, OCEAN offers a number of significant benefits to Bitcoin miners. First, it seeks to “eliminate interference from a centralized entity,” so miners can be assured that they will receive their rewards in a timely manner and without unjustified withholdings. Furthermore, by using a decentralized approach, OCEAN promotes the security and resilience of the Bitcoin network by avoiding excessive concentration of power in the hands of a few mining pools.
This is certainly a good idea, something all Bitcoiners can applaud. However, Luke Dashjr, the creator of the proposal, has only made promises at this point. The current operation of OCEAN is the same as that of the rest of the mining pools, that is, OCEAN is fully centralized in its operation. In contrast, Dashjr indicates that it will be in 2024, when the pool will operate under the Stratumv2 protocol and will finally achieve its objective: "decentralization," but it seems that all this will remain a dead letter.
Real decentralization or “a la Luke Dashjr”
Currently, OCEAN already has a significant mining power: 269 PH/s. That is a power equivalent to taking about 1400 AntMiner S21 and putting them to mine together, certainly a considerable computational power. And that same power has led them to have a certain participation in the current Bitcoin mining and thus confirm the reality of the pool: Dashjr censorship is present.
Remember that Luke Dashjr has always been one of the main proponents of implementing selective censorship within Bitcoin. This has been made clear to his client Bitcoin Knots, which has built-in censorship filters, and with the patches LJR that he designed for Bitcoin CoreFor those who don't know, these patches serve to censor a series of addresses that were integrated by default and that could be expanded as users wished. So far, so good. If you share Dashjr's vision, you can activate it, and if not, you can remove it.
Except you didn't have that last freedom, because Dashjr had already made the decision for you. Dashjr, who was then a maintainer on the Gentoo Linux distribution, enabled such filters by default without consulting anyone (or indicating it, as shown in this report).
This caused failures when processing these addresses, as filters prevented receiving or sending money to addresses that Dashjr considered "malicious", including several faucets. Due to these actions, Dashjr was severely reprimanded on multiple occasions to the point of being banned from maintenance for violating distribution guidelines.
Beyond Dashjr's mocking behavior towards the reports, Dashjr's intention at this point was clear: censor the network to your liking and visionAnd this is precisely what seems to be happening right now with OCEAN.
Censorship in the decentralized OCEAN
The publication of the OCEAN website and the message from Luke Dashjr has placed it there, already generating alerts in many long-time bitcoiners who know of Luke Dashjr's predilection for censorship.
In fact, on the OCEAN website, Dashjr has made it clear that OCEAN is nothing more than the resurrection of an old acquaintance: the Eligius mining pool. This mining pool was created by Dashjr in 2011 and was managed by his incognito partner, Wizkid057. A situation that ended up raising the volume of the alarms, due to the past and the way in which said pool ended.
It was this situation that led several Bitcoiners to keep an eye on OCEAN, and they were quick to make their first discoveries. First of all, @Sethforprivacy was the first to report that OCEAN is already actively censoring Bitcoin transactions, a situation that directly contravenes OCEAN’s stated “decentralization and censorship resistance.”
The complaint is accompanied by an operational analysis carried out by the user and miner since 2010, @checksum0In the analysis he has made public on X, @checksum0 is clear: OCEAN, Dashjr’s “decentralized” mining pool, is selectively censoring operations. Censorship is applied based on fees and content of the Bitcoin Script. Any transaction that pays a lot of commission, or that directly has a "malicious" script (an Ordinal, for example), is directly censored.
At this point, do you remember that Luke Dashjr created Bitcoin Knots to have censorship filters? Well, OCEAN precisely uses Bitcoin Knots for its mining backend, thereby having control over filtering transactions, something that even @giacomozucco (part of the OCEAN team) has openly accepted.
the weight of the past
Knowing all this Can we say that OCEAN is decentralized and censorship-free? Clearly not. Jack Dorsey, Luke Dashjr and Giacomo Zucco have decided on their own and in a position of power, to censor those transactions they do not like within the Bitcoin network. They have decided this by going over your head and over the rules of protocol that indicate that these operations are valid. Period, you cannot say anything, because if you do then you will be "the enemy."
We can't expect anything less, especially considering that OCEAN is the resurrection of Eligius. You may not know this, but Eligius that old mining pool created by Luke Dashjr didn't close in a very good way. In fact, if you go to their website, you can find it here. thread on Bitcointalk The first thing that will catch your eye is the scam warning banner on the thread.
And it is no wonder, the pool ended up receiving many complaints about payment irregularities, poor hashrate measurement, bribes, criminal use of botnet computing power and even dubious transactions that ended up related to the hack that Luke Dashjr suffered in January 2023. All of these situations have never been explained by Dashjr, and probably never will, which in the end only ends up raising alarms about the future that OCEAN will follow.
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