Topic: OFAC-Sanctioned Transactions Being Censored - page 7. (Read 2244 times)

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.

It is a peculiar double standard, isn't it?  If someone is opposed to OFAC-sanctioned censorship and also opposed to Ordinals, how would they react if someone tried creating an Ordinal using an OFAC-sanctioned address and it was blocked?

Hell of a grey area such people could find themselves in, heh.

There will be some users who are going to say the following:
-You don't like it, make your own coin!
And fully understandable, when some send other people to use altcoins because you believe in decentralization and you must keep nodes running on two decades old computers on dial-up, it's perfectly understandable to go and create your own coin that doesn't need 10billion and 10Gw of power for protection. 

And it doesn't stop here, how ironic, some talk about blacklisting ordinals, but are enraged by somebody else blacklisting their tx. Gold!
Or:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/do-you-think-satoshidice-is-blockchain-spam-drop-their-txs-solution-inside-150405

Which goes back to what I said that pools are business run by people. Their opinions of what to mine may or may not mesh up with yours.

Example, a lot of people here give Foundry a hard time, the operators get annoyed and start to not mine TXs form people whos addresses are public here. (sig campaigns, sales of things, and so on) It's their right, it's their pool. We have no say in it. No government, no OFAC, just FU to Bitcointalk users. The true free enterprise open market people would say 'good it's a private business they can do what they want' the true libertarians would say  'good it's a private business they can do what they want'.

But I have a strong suspicion that a lot of people would come here and cry 'wah wah wah the mean old pool operator is not mining our TXs'

-Dave

Funnily enough most OFAC sancitoned transactions that were dropped by F2POOl were mined by the Foundry Digital. The private close ended pool that runs exclusively for an alliance of north American miners that are to a large extent U.S. public companies. I guess this is just by chance mostly since these guys are the biggest pool lately, but it goes to show that at least for now, FEDs haven't cared to force any miner's hand at enforcing their censorship list on miners and mining pools for bitcoin.

Although it's a very real possibility, I don't think the laundering happening through bitcoin is significant enough to warrant the government's attention to that extent. They'd waste too many resources and anger a community that's quite big so they've probably purposely avoided this. Or they've just not gotten around this yet. Probably good idea to not have good faith towards FEDs.

And in typical American fashion, American companies may be given a no-gag order, obey quietly or else...
So you can just choose what State will enforce their rules, depending on where the pool is.

Unless some pool starts operating in the "dark web" (tor hidden/i2p, etc) or such, with anonymous use like ckpool does for solo. But what if those operators do a rug pull? It happened in the past in the clear net...

Maybe a REAL pool operated in El Salvador or some country favorable to Bitcoin? (not a whitelabel from yet another American company).

Covered that also:
Angry at the high fees? That's what everyone predicted the future will be like!

Last block with min 44sat fee had ‎0.558 BTC fee, the default reward is 6.25  so...500sat/b to be on the same level.


They can't increase the fee on their own, users will choose, they will either pay or not, the free market will decide what the fees are 100 years from now just as it decides now, last year there were 1 sat/b because there was no demand for space now it's 50sat/b because there is, tomorrow it might drop further or go back up, the users decide that.
Miners enforcing minimum transactions in their mined blocks will end up with nothing as this will just kill transactions on the chain completely.


One tiny detail, the hashrate is still there, users can choose this chain, but if those guys have more than enough hashrate (they do right now) they could simply make this chain inoperable, without "attacking" it, forking it or anything that would send them to court, all it takes it's for them to mine on this chain and at the difficulty adjustment reset to stop, if they have 66% of the hashpower for the next half and a half months you're going to see one back every 30 minutes. Imagine that happening now...

Until the miners start hard forking the chain to censor transactions, their refusal to include certain transactions only delays them for time on average proportional to their share of network hashpower. And when or if there will be such attempt, I'm sure the whole community will choose the censorship-free chain, just like it previously rejected SegWit2x fork attempt.

I had a similar concern a few months back when I asked if fees will be enough to keep miners on the network when the main incentive (block rewards) are taken off the equation. It will be interesting to see how things play out when we get to that. Probably they'd have to increase fees in order to compensate for the lack of block rewards.

We'll find out when the time comes but from what I know, no one will burn those expenses to keep the network up and running out of the goodness of their hearts.

Your FUD is amazing...

Are you trying to justify BSV's confiscation mechanism?

@Everyone

HmmMAA is a BSV/CSW fanatic who loves spouting anti-BTC FUD.

Well , i don't know if in a property that you don't have the right to use , move or sell you can be considered it's owner .

Miners and nodes can do whatever they want, nothing changes the ownership over your coins.
Somebody denying you a service is not out of the ordinary, Foundry could simply mine empty blocks, Binance could not let you open an account, the other people might choose not to sell your  single coin cause they don't like your eye color or your nickname, don't compare the protocol with personal business decision.


ViaBTC loses one hundred times more money from running their accelerator, fees form some sanctioned address are not even rounding error  numbers.


I hope too I'm wrong but seeing how Korea forced their exchanges to make withdrawal only to other KYC addresses and this has been going for a while, what stops other countries doing so, and from exchanges to miners and pools it's just a step and a new signature on a law. Yeah, one can hope but the problem is that I don't see a way out of it if enforced.


Well, running miners cost money, so , why should they do it for free?
Quite ironic, one one side we have small blocks cause it would be costly otherwise to run some 20 000 computers with 16GB of ram and a 8TB ssd, on the other hand we want decentralization and, let's see who will host 2 million 5Kw $10K machines.
Decentralization comes with a ....PRICE! 

Going to be an unpopular opinion but.

1) Pools are a BUSINESS.
2) Businesses are run by people with different views some of which you may agree with some of which you may not.
3) Businesses are profit driven and for the most part risk adverse. So they will give up some profit at times to mitigate risk.

Is mining a transaction on the OFAC sanctioned list worth it.

Well now you have to factor in a few things.
1) Do the operators agree with it? If yes then they will not mine it. It's their pool. If they don't want to mine TXs from certain people / addresses they are free not to. You are free to point your miners someplace else.

2) Even if they don't agree with it, is the risk worth it? This now gets trickier. Fees are high and the mempool is full. At worst they are giving up fractions of pennies to mine different transactions. If it's years in the future and we have gone through several more 1/2ings and most the the reward comes from fees and the mempool is empty, and they are paying a large fee you can have a different view. For now, no sane business would risk it

Does this go against the spirit of BTC? Perhaps, but with no pools because they are all under threat from various governments there would be no BTC as we know it. So they walk the line.

Also, and this is a big also. Don't forget this also helps smaller pools and greater distribution of mining since smaller pools will probably not enforce the ban, and this perhaps could get more people mining at them.

-Dave

I mean everyone can make mistakes, I believe that everyone deserves a second chance, this isn't really as big of a deal as people think. I get that if it was something huge then we would have something that would be quite difficult to handle, but when we are in a situation like this, it is not going to be all that crazy to be fair and we should see it change one way or another.

I believe that the best thing to do right now would be making sure that you could end up with a profit if you know what you are doing with mining, and this company does know what they are doing and they are a strong one and preferred one by many miners, so there shouldn't be really an issue with it and we should keep it going as strong as ever.

I can’t agree less with you that the volatility of bitcoin which makes it profitable when you invest in it has actually made people to forget about the main aim which is privacy. We can see how people easily trade on centralized exchanges just to make the money without caring too much about the privacy. This has even made some people feel that with government control or KYC exchanges the bitcoin network is safer than how decentralized or privacy oriented it is now, and I tell you this exactly where the government want us to be.

Take for example the hype around the bitcoin ETF, at first I thought it should be a thing of concern because AFAIK those institutions opting for ETF are worse than CEXs in terms of privacy (as I believe the government will easily have more control over them than the latter) but most people are happy it is happen because according to them it will drive in more people and make bitcoin price skyrocket.

That sounds ideal but by how bitcoin is currently structured, miners hold a lot of power over users that seek to make transactions.
So the debate would be around what avenues users have against miners that are actually enforcing censorship.

An outside party could argue that since miners know what transactions they are confirming, they are in a way contributing to "financial crime".
A tweet I shared above shows Adam Back has proposed a potential solution to this, but I haven't seen its potential drawbacks discussed anywhere to know if it's any good. Maybe now is the time to accelerate developing something like this.

The problem is that although we may be more privacy conscious in this forum, people who are starting to invest in bitcoin are mostly doing so because of the possibility of a big profit in fiat. Then maybe when they invest some people start to inform themselves and may change, which implies a long way: if they have bought bitcoin in a CEX they should return it to the CEX (assuming it is in their custody), sell it, pay the corresponding taxes and from there if they get bitcoin with DEX or in other ways with privacy they hope that a long time passes without anyone thinking of investigating them because they once bought and sold it in a CEX.

It is easier to fuck up privacy than the other way around.

I don't want a debate. I don't want it to be up for argument, and whichever side shouts loudest wins. I want a permissionless, uncensorable, network.

Hoping is insufficient. Governments around the world will continue to push ahead with more and more invasive control if we don't stop them. I've said for a long time we need more on-chain privacy as a default, but no one cares about privacy anymore. They only care about making more fiat profit. And so bitcoin is headed for government control, and the masses will be happy because they made a few bucks along the way.