Topic: OFAC-Sanctioned Transactions Being Censored - page 6. (Read 1850 times)

If Bitcoin ever becomes centralized, it will no longer maintain its current purchasing value. That's for sure.

Bitcoin became so valuable because it's the first decentralized, censor-free, digital currency.

Big entities (such as pools) can always become corrupted, assuming they no longer care about making money/profit (ever heard of "go woke, go broke"?). The establishment can ruin everything you love, as long as it's centralized (Hollywood, Netflix, video game companies etc.)

People can always form new pools, or join smaller ones, especially those that don't steal transaction fees from miners (didn't know that was a thing, totally despicable). KYC demands are also unreasonable.

My personal bet is that the WEF elites (Bill Gates etc.) definitely want Bitcoin for themselves as a lifeboat to secure their wealth (convert fiat deposits & SP500 stocks to BTC ETF). They do NOT want it for the masses/plebs.

That's why BlackRock wants to enter the BTC realm. Billionaires want a valuable asset to secure their wealth right before they perform The Great -Currency/Debt- Reset (which I reckon will happen around 2026-2027 during Taiwan's invasion by China). Fiat currencies (USD, EUR etc.) will melt (Weimar-style) and this will be the perfect opportunity to shove CBDC down people's throats.

I know this sounds like a crazy tinfoil hat conspiracy theory to some people around here, but what would you do if you were Bill Gates?

Would you trust CBDC? Especially considering the fact it will have a limit of €2000-3000 (as ECB officials have said)?

Do you wanna own nothing and be happy? Because with only 2-3k dollars/euros you will be forced to rent everything (your house, your car etc.)

This is another reason why NO ONE in their right mind should sell their BTC stash, especially before BlackRock's ETF approval (which will happen by mid-March 2024 at the latest).

I sure as hell wouldn't destroy Bitcoin if I were Bill Gates or Klaus Schwab, BUT I would badmouth it all the time in mainstream media to deter the plebs from buying even a single satoshi!

It makes sense if they want to buy BTC at a low price and even cause weak hands/panic sellers to sell some more to them...

I don't believe that the referred masses use bitcoin in the first place. To me, only someone who owns their keys can be said to truly use bitcoin.

I don't believe that the masses control the world. Maybe they did once, but not anymore. Democracy is a failure. It's just the least worse regime comparably to the rest. Or as someone had once put it, "Democracy is the worst regime, except all the others". For it to function properly, it requires strong citizen maturity and character, and that is almost never the case. Granted. It is the closest thing we have to harmoniously live alongside and, by compromises, to maintain a healthy community. But it's self-destructive, just as humans. It is inevitable at some point that social institutions will corrupt, and the people will not just turn against the corrupted institution, but to the democratic system itself.

And that is why I like Bitcoin. It is not a democracy. It requires little effort to work; and works good. It is not controlled by the masses, but by neither a tyrant. It inherits the good virtues of democracy without incorporating the extensive effort and conditions it entails. You need Internet connection and a computer. Boom, money sent overseas secured by a mechanism which converts human greed to collective benefit. The bet is that this beautiful combo can overcome human corruption, or at the very least, navigate around it.

To not talk at length, only a fraction of the userbase is the driving force of Bitcoin. Genuine users who endorse the views of state-less money, accept bitcoin and spread the word, miners who maintain the status quo, and technicians who write the code. Not weak hands. Neither regulators. It's just currently apparent that centralized entities like mining pools and exchanges are susceptible to censorship. We already acknowledge that since 2009. We move on.

No, see, bitcoin already has structures of (certain) authority that help govern it.
It's not complete unstructured anarchy that's going on with it's developments. Certain older core devs approve proposals for discussion for instance.
Others review code changes and push them to release.

Even the mailing list is Grey listed.

This process is neither democratic nor very free (as in freedom). But the community generally trusts these individuals as they have years of contributions to back their position.
But if an emergency event was to happen like an unintended fork or a sustained 51% attack, what were the users going to do?
Would we form a new organization to deal with these emergency issues?
Probably not. Most users would likely follow what the existing core developers proposed as a solution, trusting them in downloading their client update.
Unless of course they were deemed as bad faith actors.


Leaving the window open for abuse means that it's bound to happen at one point or another.
Just as MARA pool was doing OFAC compliant blocks in 2021, same as F2POOL this year etc. Can't base this relationship completely on trust.

There might be solutions without making  bitcoin transactions completely dark.
Adam Back called his proposal committed transactions, which was demonstrated 10 years ago. Maybe that idea could be picked up to be worked on again so we can see how feasible it is.

Well, the problem with the price is that maxis are the ones who want it to only go up . If the price doesn't double as maxis desire in each cycle , then mining/securing the network becomes unprofitable . That's what the other chains saw during the hashwars and decided to split . So don't blame the "ignorant" masses . Just admit that you didn't foresee what was about to happen . Either bitcoin lives from fees and not subsidy , or it dies. Btc chose its path , the only way to survive is if the price goes up . Alternatively , stop running rasppis and decide to invest in mining gear , and run them altruistically to support your ideas . Just make sure to buy a lot of hashpower , as double-spending attacks might occur .

Also fixed a sentence to point things properly: "Are they going to care about a few transactions belonging to other people criminals that are being censored?"

Well, this is the problem of large scale networks, unless pools could operate in a country not influenced by US, or they could somehow anonymize themselves and their farms. This is obviously a takeover of big pools.
~D

What's the alternative? We sit around, shake our fists, do nothing, wait for more mining pools to capitulate to government demands, and then lament that bitcoin is under government control?

I expect mining pools to understand the ethics and principles of the BTC network, it is true that mining is a 'business' and miners want to make profit, but sanctioning tx's defeats the principles and ethics of the network and it also doesn't help them in the case of making profit, because they are rejecting the tx fees attached to those tx's. The authorities cannot 'impose' anything on miners, because pools have the 'right' to oppose any policy that affects the nature of the BTC network, and if the conditions because so unfavorable, it is better miners relocate or pack up their gears from such locations, than for them to directly 'attack' the BTC network.
That is not possible, the BTC blockchain is both a public and transparent ledger, everything is open to everyone and even if this was possible, i would not support it.

BSV is not censorship resistant:

https://twitter.com/BobSummerwill/status/1577714409618931713
https://github.com/bitcoin-sv/bitcoin-sv/releases/tag/v1.0.13

Who will migrate to a shitcoin under Faketoshi's leadership?

You know that's impossible without a hard fork, right?

People might migrate to Monero, but it has totally different tokenomics (due to tail emission).

Whether you exclude transactions or include dust spam over and over, both are considered attack on Bitcoin, the dude is too young to understand this is a game to him out of the competition. What can we do, survival of the fittest, right?

Would it, though? That'll be the day the likes of us abandon bitcoin, but the masses don't care. They let centralized exchanges act as banks, surveil their every move, hold their coins, and dictate how they can spend them. They use custodial wallets which can stop serving them at any time, like Wallet of Satoshi just did. All they care about is "when moon", and not at all about the whole point of bitcoin in the first place. They cheer for more regulations since it means bitcoin "is going mainstream", and eagerly await institutional investors, ETFs, and the like. Are they going to care about a few transactions belonging to other people are being censored? The fact that this censorship is barely being discussed across this forum/Reddit/Twitter/etc. tells you all you need to know. People don't care.

So a centralized third party to police the other centralized third parties? No thanks. What we need is more privacy by default on the base layer to make this kind of censorship impossible to begin with.

What a bummer, I'm not optimistic about it, but seeing you say that, along with the stompix popcorn, makes me even more pessimistic.


With the current hashrate you can not, I think that could only be possible in the hypothetical scenario they are painting in which a majority of miners begin to censor transactions and a few others do not, so there would be a fork that would have much less hashrate and then maybe the scenario you speak about would happen but it does not seem a very rosy future, and I do not have much technical knowledge, someone correct me or clarify if it is not entirely correct what I say.

I think that this we've gotten into actually identifying one of the weaknesses of libertarianism.
Libertarians don't particularly like organizations that exercise authority or hold power.
But what happens when someone hurts you in some manner? You could straight up ignore, but sometimes at risk of great losses.
Some libertarians might like to call this a violation of the Non Aggression Principle but... Who gets to enforce the repercussions and how?

In the scenario that miners chose to block certain addresses from ever confirming transactions, it might be their choice, but why should we simply respect it if it infringes upon us?
In that case, it would be better to have established some sort of organization to be able to in a way punish the bad faith miners by responding accordingly in a timely manner.
This organization would have to function under a certain framework in order to avoid having to much power over others, and would have to exist pro-actively, instead of being formed after issues arise.
The pro-active organization's mere existence could act as a deterrent to bad-faith actors, but it would surely be a good measure to have in place if anything bad actually happens.

So there we go. Authority and organization are sometimes meaningful. Likewise today, certain bitcoin Core developers are the absolute authority to how Bitcoin Improvement Proposals are passed into the discussion phase. But if it weren't for them, many more people would have to be dragged into bureaucratic procedures as to whether or not even we should open a discussion that the vast majority of the community would consider stupid anyway.

[In reality this time though, the miners this time saw the value in their brand image towards the public and just backed out of filtering transactions (for now at least). So there's also non-coercive means to work with at the first stages of trying to achieve something.]

But on that note, with the freedom of being able to exclude transactions, also comes some responsibility that bad faith authorities like the OFAC might want to impose on bitcoin miners. So the idea of cloaking transactions before confirmation just so miners can't see what they're confirming might be a good idea after all. No possibility to pick and choose means reduced liability also.

If Bitcoin in fact does become censored then is it possible for us to return to CPU Mining?  Back when Bitcoin was created this was the norm.  Right?  1 CPU equals 1 vote.  It was supposed to be like this so every body has a right to vote.  Now we get warehouses of GPUs used for Mining.  There is no more such thing as 'every body gets a right to vote' because others have way too many votes.

If these warehouses start censoring.  How about we just go back to what Bitcoin was and return to CPU mining?  This renders ALL censoring warehouses useless for Bitcoin Mining and gives us all back the power.

Is there any danger I do not see?

Don't forget that there are chains with a different mindset than the one of btc community that will welcome those pools and hashrate .

If that happened I could see 2 things happening.
1) A fork war.
2) BTC loosing all it's value and it not mattering who mined what anyway since nobody would be using it anymore.

No pool would really want to do that because they would probably see the same things and know that it would kill their business.

-Dave

I have gone through each post of the thread and I agree with you that Bitcoin isn't censorship resistant and maybe in future those people who want to make Bitcoin centralized will be successful at doing that. The pools are backed by the miners who just want to earn money from mining and that's the unfortunate thing which no one can change. If pools allow  miners to pay low-fees then the miners will blindly join those pools that allow them to earn their mining profits without sharing much percentage with the pools, but they don't know that on the basis of their mining power the pools can do many things with the transactions.

I know that in present days Bitcoin is still not in their control fully but surely when they have a lot of hash power and with that 51% attack they may get the power to decide what to do with the transactions that they don't like. Even, in the current situation that pool blacklisted those transactions doesn't have that 51% hash power to control the whole network but still they can blacklist the transactions or addresses they don't want and that's a sign that they have control over the network to some extent already. I hope that they won't gain complete control over it as that would be a huge threat to privacy as that would impact the decentralized nature of Bitcoin.

That'd be the time to abandon Bitcoin for good. The day mining pools reorg the chain is the day there is nothing valuable to secure. It'd be suicidal.

And in such a scenario, the pro-censorship majority can simply ignore any blocks which include transactions they dislike. Any blocks mined by the non-censoring pools can just be re-orged out of the chain at will.

As it turns out, bitcoin is not censorship resistant. It simply isn't being censored right now.

Governments want to censor bitcoin (alas), and there appears to be a mining pool which complies with that. While truly sad for the chairmen of that business, Bitcoin is censorship resistant. The game theory is still on run. They are only harming their pockets. Even in an extreme scenario where most of the hash rate is pro-censorship, there will still be a few pools which will not censor. Those will be enough for any transaction to be confirmed.

It wouldn't surprise me if this brilliant idea was proposed by an incompetent politician.

So, are we now agreeing that bitcoin is in fact not censorship resistant at all, and depends on trusted third parties (mining pools) in order for anyone to use it?

Don't need to make your own coin, just use Monero. It is impossible to perform this kind of attack on Monero.

For what its worth, I don't think ordinals should be censored either, regardless of how stupid I think they are:


When did free speech and freedom from censorship become the fringe view among the bitcoin community? It's quite disturbing.