Topic: Is address blacklisting possible on BTC? - page 2. (Read 439 times)

Small miners can join pools which are not censoring transactions.

This is a hashrate battle. In the end, if there are still pools/miners not censoring transactions and mining blocks, those transactions will go thorough .

Thanks guys,

Yeah, that was exactly my way of thinking too: A miner in a sanctioned jurisdiction can validate all the blocks (even ones with blacklisted addresses) but it wont include transactions with blacklisted addresses when producing new blocks.
So yeah, basically the protocol itself doesn't protect from blacklisting, right?

I get your point bitmover that because of stronger privacy the BTC network can be more resilient to censorship. But still it means that miners need to be brave / freedom fighters and undertake the risk of being illegal under their own jurisdiction.


OK. So let's assume that regulators want to blacklist certain addresses and a lot of BTC believers and freedom fighters join the BTC network in response...
What I don't get: does that even matter if I spin up a node as an individual? In POW the strongest get to mine, right? So following this, the lot of freedom fighter, average Joes never get to mine a single block, so they won't be able to include the blacklisted txs. What do I miss here?

And yeah, even an 51+% attack can occur what jackg mentioned.
In the Tornado Cash situation US created the sanction, but they also threatened other countries that they'll get punished if they don't comply.
So let's say if a law is enforced on multiple countries by a powerful enough country then theoretically even a 51% attack scenario is not out of the question. But ofc it can be counterattacked by spinning up more and more nodes across the world; and so I ask the same question as above: how small fish can help this situation in POW?

Additionally to what pooya87 said, I believe miners are also more censorship resistant than eth validators because they are not so easily identified.

Eth validators are individuals and companies (such as exchanges) holding millions of usd worth in ETH.

While bitcoin miners are much more decentralized and grouped in pools, they are also not so easily identified. So it is not so easy to enforce regulations to them

I'd guess the possibility chatgpts bot was getting onto was an idea that miners would "hate" and try to orphan blocks that were mined with transactions they wanted to censor - this would be possible at 50% hashing power and would be stabler (/more effective) the higher it got.

Realistically, you're not doing that without killing the network off in some way (as you've proved it's pretty insecure). It'd take a huge budget to pull off something on that scale though.

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It's more likely certain miners would just choose to not include transactions they don't like and leave the rest to be mined by someone else as mentioned above.

This is incomplete/incorrect.

There are two things that are being confused here.
First is consensus rules that dictate what block, etc. is valid and what isn't and second is the miners' preference to include a certain transaction in their block or not.

The consensus rules is something that the miners can't change on their own because if they do that their blocks would become invalid hence rejected by the entire network. That means they can run different "code" but they have to enforce the same exact rules.

But for censorship (refusing to include a certain transaction in their block) they do not need to change consensus rules. It is pretty much the same as how they treat different transaction with different fees (they refuse to include a tx with low fee as long as there are more txs with higher fee).

The way to fight censorship is very similar to the fee situation too. For example if one miner/mining-pool decides to not include any tx with fee rate below 10 sat/vbyte the rest of the world won't follow.
There is no way to prevent miners from censoring transactions but what we can do and have done so far is to have the most decentralized mining system by spreading the miners around the globe. That means if a government in one jurisdiction enforced censorship laws on the miners in their own jurisdiction (eg. US government forcing MARA pool to censor transactions) all the rest of the miners in the rest of the world won't follow that.

It is the same with nodes. Individuals around the world are each running their own nodes and are under different jurisdictions so there is no way to force any kind of laws on all of them regarding which transaction they relay and which they don't.

I am not very knowledgeable in mining and bitcoin core handling but something is telling me that you do not need to wait for other miners to include your transaction for broadcasting. If you are running a full node then you can do it by your own or something. I really hope I did not give a wrong hope to you.

Hi there,

I'd like to understand BTC's censorship resistance.
Why it is not a possibility that the same can happen to BTC what happened on ETH regarding Tornado Cash? ETH validators obeyed the sanctions and the don't include transactions that interact with TC addresses. That's basically address blacklisting...

So I guess BTC miners can decide as well to not include certain transactions from the mem pool (fearing punishment for going against the law or sanctions).

I admit I first chatted with ChatGPT about this before coming here
It said: in order to ignore certain addresses the miners would need to modify the code and hence it would become incompatible with the current version of the network.
Is this true? Can't I make modifications and keep compatibility?

Do miners have to run the EXACT same code? I mean is it checked by the hash of the codebase or something?

I'm just a tech guy who'd like to learn
Cheers