Topic: OFAC-Sanctioned Transactions Being Censored - page 5. (Read 2162 times)

Hihihi, you forgot one thing, the one that makes the world spin, MONEY!

Every system will work, even democracy or communism will do perfectly until you hit the money thing, and that's when the problems come, based on the scale of money involved, the ability of an individual to seize it all and the price everyone puts on their beliefs, so if they sell that for 10 cents a day, there you go NK failure.

And that will come to Bitcoin, Bitcoin itself is just a  protocol, it can't become corrupted on his own, but as any protocol it relies on humans, humans update its features, humans host nodes, humans host miners, humans make transactions, and so on, but most importantly!!!
Humans make MONEY out of this, and this feature is the point of failure if it's impossible to find a mechanism to prevent is, which is not that easy.

But you know what's the currents stop? Also money!
So miners won't do something stupid because they will lose money on it, now offer them twice as much and you'll see how frail the protocol is against greed, but right now it's money that's guarding the network.


There is no such thing!
No matter what protocol you choose you can design an ASIC that will outperform your average Joe computer by an order of magnitude.
What's preventing some coins for being mined by ASICs is their daily reward, if that is worth a few thousand dollars a day nobody will invest in building an ASIC for that, but with BTC we talk about 30-40 million a day.


You really think people would abandon cash for credit cards, hard cash in hand for 401k, your free spending for FICO ? Oh wait...
We're talking about 8 billion people, and 14 years in which way less than 40 million (and these are addresses not wallets) have chosen to be their own bank, probably the right numbers being lower than even 5 million.

Judging by this thread, there is some denial that CBDCs aren't necessarily a bad thing, in fact it's such a "good" thing that people will be "enthusiastic" to abandon physical cash in favor of CBDC!

My disappointment arises from the fact that I have high expectations from Bitcoiners (unless they pretend to be Bitcoiners and in reality they're undercover feds)... they should not be so gullible.

CBDC is like a digital jail. Once you enter it, there is no going back to normal (as Klaus Schwab has said).

I'm sorry, but you're the one who has garbage counterarguments here. You insult my intelligence when you insinuate that people will be happy to accept CBDC (along with its consequences).

There is no conspiracy theory regarding CBDC (Digital ID, carbon credits, social credit score, 15-min cities).

It's already a reality in China and they're preparing to bring it in the West, only because there are gullible people like you who know nothing about WEF, Great Reset, Klaus Schwab.

ps: I know many non-BTC people (no-coiners) who resist against CBDC and want to retain cash at all costs.

Eventually they will be forced to shallow the orange pill, but at least they resist against this sci-fi dystopia...

By which point it will be too late to change anything. We will never be able to go back to before mass surveillance. Once CBDCs are launched, we will never be able to go back to before they existed. And once the government have control of the bitcoin network and can censor at will, we will never be able to go back to it being free. Which is why we need to be discussing solutions now.

It is a never ending war that we should continue fighting and defending Bitcoin. The Stratum V2 shows that there is still hope and we are on the correct path.

People usually don't become aware of something they've lost until it hits them in the face. And the way the governments invade privacy is slow and unnoticed so people don't panic! For example they knew NSA was monitoring their every move but they didn't go nuts until the intelligence leak went viral. Then again they forgot about it shortly after.

It's the same with banks and also CBDCs. Until it doesn't go down like 2008 and blow up in their faces, they won't realize what they don't already have.

So I have dismantled the garbage argument that was a pure conspiracy and you come back to me with the adjective "gullible". Read again and see to whom you have to apply the adjective.


Yes, well, the concern for privacy that I see on the forum I don't see on the street in my day to day life where almost nobody pays with cash anymore. From there to enthusiastically using CBDCs is a step.

Another curious thing is that CBDCs indeed eliminate the need for conventional banks in the same way that a combine harvester eliminates the need for human hand harvesters. But it seems the bureaucrats don't want that part of progress, or at least they don't want it to happen too fast.


I am starting to see some resistance to CBDCs from non-Bitcoin environments, but minimal. I'm pessimistic on the subject. There have been countries like Venezuela and Nigeria where the launch of CBDCs has been a failure but I think in other parts of the world is going to be different.

The point is that some other miner can do it, and take their profit. That's where censorship resistance originates from. A miner dislikes a transaction? Another will mine it. A mining pool operator dislikes a transaction? Another will mine it. All big mining pools' operators dislike a transaction? Then maybe miners have to migrate elsewhere, where they get to decide these crucial policies. If they don't, then the entire game theory starts falling apart, and that is nobody's benefit but the governments'.

Yes, transaction data can be broadcasted to hell and back, perhaps even stored on a full node literally on the moon.
But if a miner doesn't include it in his blocks, what's the point?
That's the issue here. No matter how you broadcast transactions, miners wield more power over users.

This is one of the worst things I have ever read this year.

I am not only surprised by a mining pool's participation in distorting the decentralization on which they operate their services, but by their accepting involvement in this and depriving themselves of a measure of the profits that they receive in the form of fees, even if the transactions are few, but this is fundamentally against the principles of investment profit.

Now let us change the angle of analysis a little: You can imagine how what happened will raise waves of debate about the right of mining pools to do this for two main reasons: First, because there are no laws controlling their field, and any mining pool has the right to choose the transactions it includes without accountability from anyone. Secondly, how appropriate are these actions with reality, since it can be argued that these mining pools refuse to facilitate the transactions of those who are classified as terrorists or subject to sanctions by one of the most important international approval bodies.

The last point I would like to point out, which also surprised me, is that Binance, which seeks to curry favor with the American authorities, has not engaged in such actions, but we find F2Pool doing so even though it is an Asian company. I doubt that this was done at the request of the American authorities.

I already see some people around here embracing things such as Digital ID, carbon credits (because apparently human beings cause climate change) and yes, even mass surveillance with tons of cameras and suggesting that Bitcoin is the perfect "timestamp machine" to store video feeds from innocent citizens.

Trust me, sometimes I'm genuinely wondering if I'm talking to Bitcoiners or feds... people conceal their identity, so it's very easy to pretend and play some fictitious role.

Regarding OFAC, I remember back in 2020 during the 1st COVID lockdown some BTC pool trying to censor transactions, but it didn't last for too long.

F2pool only has 11.4% of the hashrate. Still a far cry from 51%. Chances are it will fizzle out again.

Who is the best source? Craig Wright?

Good luck spending power if major pools decide to reject those blocks . And i really wonder , for how long will those miners are willing to burn money until they find out that they can't do anything ?
You should study how bitcoin works , and Antonopoulos isn't the best source . You are the only one that can question how the structure of the network is made , stop believing others .
As for stratum V2 that some like , you will find out that sooner or later it leads to the same model . There's no way way out , like in hotel California
"We are programmed to receive
You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave!"

Edit : Oh , and good luck trusting a pool that takes advantage of what the btc community currently needs , hope . Another rug pull on the making . Good luck to those who chose it .

A smart client is not that smart if it endorses censorship that might turn up against them in the future.

Besides that. "Information is easy to spread but hard to stifle"-- Someone someone. You cannot prevent information from spreading across a peer-to-peer network. If a few pro-censorship nodes decide to blacklist addresses, the owners of the blacklisted coins can simply select to broadcast them elsewhere.

I think you're overestimating, and dare I say romanticizing, bitcoin's blockchain infrastructure.
If miners unilaterally decide to block certain addresses there's very little the users can do while staying on the same network.
Even if they actively blocked a significant portion of total transactions going on, a smart client could chose to also ignore these transactions and set its fees regardless of them, knowing that they will never get confirmed. So users not caring about censorship and only interested to transact cheaply would be incentivιsed to just filter transactions in the same way that miners do too.  
So no, censorship is not a problem that could solve itself. Some action and intervention would be needed if it became a large problem.

Troubling for some but the incentives of bitcoin will render these attempts at censorship impotent.

If transactions continue to get censored, the natural outcome is that mempool fees will bloat and the market dynamic of on-chain fees and the fee rate come into play. The highest fees will be included in the next block. If your transactions are censored, then you will need to pay a greater fee rate to get included in a block in a reasonable amount of time. You can also CoinJoin to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the first place.

Additionally, we are seeing the beginning of the emergence of a pleb mining pool (https://web.public-pool.io) that is likely to continue to grow even if only as a hobby project.

The more transactions that are censored, the greater the incentive for fees to rise which incentivizes more miners to come online and add those transactions to the blockchain

IMHO, all this shows is that OFAC is scared of bitcoin but they can't really do anything to stop it.

I say we do what we're already doing. Writing software. When exchanges started implementing KYC, and out of nowhere taint appeared, decentralized exchanges emerged as a need. And they did because centralized exchanges were central point of failures. Today there is a daily volume of more than 2 million dollars worth of bitcoin, with over 900 trades per day, proving that it works: https://bisq.markets/.

Now, mining in a decentralized manner but with attractive conditions is what's needed.

Good news. Miners deciding the candidate block's transactions is step 1. Step 2 would be to decentralize their coordination altogether, because now the government will be hostile towards the mining pools that'll adopt this.

Ok, that's the bet. But we need to actually do something about it when faced with pools like F2Pool which are enforcing said corruption. Simply expressing out displeasure will achieve nothing. So the question is - what are we going to do? I would favor more privacy on the base layer making this kind of censorship impossible. I am very clearly in the minority here and this is highly unlikely to ever happen. So what other options are there beyond doing nothing and waiting for the day the government controls bitcoin?

This summarizes it perfectly.

The government want bitcoin to be under their control. There is currently a route which we can foresee to the government achieving this (get 51% of the hashrate to comply with their blacklists and censorship). The government are not going to stop kicking down doors until they achieve their goal, unless we do something to stop them. Shaking our fists and hoping for the best is insufficient.

The difference is I can simply refuse to use any CEX as I always have done and there is nothing they can do to my coins or my transactions. I hold no such power when it comes to mining pools deciding to censor me.

---

When it comes to other options, I've spoken before about Stratum V2, and with perfect timing I see this news story pop up yesterday: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/demand-launches-worlds-first-stratum-v2-bitcoin-mining-pool

The problem is mining hashrate is largely controlled by centralized mining pools. It's easy enough to censor transactions this way. Only solo miners have the true power to decide which transactions to approve or decline on the network. With how expensive PoW mining is becoming each day, things are going to get worse in the long run (more centralization). BTC needs to switch to an ASIC-resistant algorithm to strip away big mining companies and centralized mining pools from power.

This will be a subject of constant debate within the community. If centralized mining pools censored transactions (particularly F2Pool) tied to criminal activities, what makes you think they won't target the average person in the long run? Anything deemed suspicious could put your funds at risk (unable to move them on the Blockchain). It'll be just like what banks do today. The future is widely unpredictable, so we can only hope for the best.

I doubt anyone here is entertaining that notion, but it's the kind of thing the bureaucrats obsess over.  I suppose they are accountable if they do get it wrong, but yes, it's a pretty far-fetched scenario.  

Our goal presumably involves trying to highlight to the uninitiated masses what the consequences might be for them if they do adopt CBDCs.  The absolute death-knell of privacy being chief amongst them, but censorship a serious concern as well (and, unlike this current situation with a small percentage of pools censoring OFAC listed addresses, it's likely to be a more pervasive, inescapable and unyielding type of censorship with CBDCs, with little room for recourse).  Even if we can't necessarily persuade people about the advantages of using Bitcoin, it could be an "anything but CBDCs" kind of discussion.  

The masses have a distinct knack for acting against their own self-interests when given the opportunity, so it won't be as easy as it might sound to convince them that CBDCs are very bad for them.  You'd be surprised at how quickly some might embrace this mass-surveillance foolishness.

You really think people will be so enthusiastic to abandon cash in favor of CBDC, social credit score, carbon credits, 15-min cities?

Only a gullible person would believe that... I think Bitcoiners can do better than that.

Whenever there is a door to be kicked down, the governments will kick it down.

That is why in Bitcoin we eliminated the "doors" to be kicked down through decentralization. However, centralization has a way of creeping back in somehow. Whether it is custodial wallets, centralized exchanges or the centralized mining pools.
Whet we need to do is to fight this centralization. We are lucky that the mining pools are slightly spread and they can not all be forced to perform such an "attack" on Bitcoin by censoring transactions, ... at this point. But we eventually have to address this vulnerability.

This is not an issue with Bitcoin (the protocol) itself. It is an issue with how we use the protocol.
It's kind of like using CEX. If you store your coins there and the CEX owner freezes them, that doesn't mean Bitcoin is vulnerable. It means you used Bitcoin wrong.

It's the same with pools. If majority of them end up censoring transactions, that doesn't make Bitcoin not-censorship resisstant. It is our own fault for not creating more pools for miners to join that are located in jurisdictions that anti-privacy governments don't have authority in. It is our own fault for not finding an alternative to the existing mining pool protocols where the owner decides what to include in the block and what not. A protocol that the owner no longer decides what proposal to signal for and what not. Remember SegWit days that we had the same issue where miners wanted the change but pools refused to signal?