Topic: The new mining pool, Marathon miners censoring Bitcoin transactions; (Read 535 times)

That does seem the most likely option.

And yeah, I'm sure we'll hear something controversial from them again soon enough.  That said, the people here don't forget and it seems like very little escapes the attention of the ever-watchful gaze of the denizens of this community.  I suspect they'll be monitored closely from now on, so they'll have to be pretty cunning to surprise us with any nefarious schemes.

As I don't trust this kind of move I would place my bet on a PR move.

Financially they would not be affected that bad, even more, so frustrating is the fact I have to admit Marathon managed to nailed it when it comes to the business plan, they secured the mining gear, they did so at prices before the bull run, probably the guys at Bitmain are desperately trying to find a way out of that contract right now and they've also managed to get a fair price on electricity (rumors here, don't know how accurate)
Bottom line Marathon is getting brand new gear at 1/3 of the price we would be able to, it runs on investor's money so less pressure for being profitable, and a loss compared to others on an average of 10sat/vb from filtering would really mean nothing.

I think that they came out with this just so they could sell some good news everyone wants to hear, doing something stupid exactly now would hurt the price more and it would hurt their reputation, tweet something, distribute internally some notes reassuring investors of a masterplan and that's it.
Everybody is happy!

But!, I don't think this is over, we're going to hear again from them, stupid shit doesn't get away so easily.
And I'm almost sure their next bright idea will be even more astonishing.!

No doubt. The next one we'll see will probably be forced by regulating bodies.

They did say that they're updating it only this week in the video. I'd say give them sometime to do so, not like they're in a hurry anyways or anything would change.

Well, good thing they have capitulated, although I doubt very much this is the last we have heard of mining pools censoring transactions or "OFAC compliant" blocks.

It's also quite telling that although they have said they will signal for Taproot, none of the blocks they are mining do so yet. Quite clear that they do not actually want to support Taproot, but felt they had to give in at the last minute now we have ~98% consensus so as to not jeopardize their profits.

It doesn't. The article doesn't state that they are not censoring transactions specifically due to Taproot but that they're upgrading without including any censorship features to filter the transactions. Likely just a decision that they've made and has nothing to do with Taproot.

They've probably realized that openly filtering transactions has gone wrong and lowered their profit margin without any censorship effects. Continuing their own practices this way would get nothing done and just make people unhappy. However, filtering transactions covertly would not.

Either they "finally" realized it was a useless plan or everything was just a marketing strategy ^{[as I mentioned before]} of some sort.
^{- It's amazing how quickly people change their stance nowadays}

Horror scenario is a huge understatement. However, this made me laugh.

Maybe, but with the mempool emptying out to 1-2 sats/vbyte levels, then I'm not sure this is going to bring them any real additional profit.

Sounds like Marathon have now changed their stance on censoring transactions.  Do we think this was an ethical decision?  Or a financial one?  The timing of this raises questions for me.  Is it possible the recent price drop caught them off guard and interfered with their profit margins?  Were they maybe left with no alternative?

We clearly have very different definitions of the word "good".

Either bitcoin is censorship resistant, or it isn't. If they can censor some transactions, then they can censor any transactions, yours included. I don't know if you've had much experience with the US government, but they are pretty close to the bottom of the list of "people I trust with control over my money".

First they censored the darknet markets, and I did not speak out, because I did not use darknet markets...

i like bitcoin mining like this,
I understand their goal of creating a mine that can censor every bitcoin transaction. I see their goal is good, which is so that people who carry out activities on the dark web can be sanctioned by the US Department of Treasury, so that all the bitcoins they generate are clean or not generated from the dark web which is likely to have criminal transactions on it.

Having re-read the other two topics and a few articles, all three might be the same pool.  Blockseer is a subsidiary of DMG (Coindesk, Greyscale, etc).  And DCMNA is a partnership between DMG and Marathon. 

Maybe they've just been really indecisive and taken three different attempts to name their pool, heh.

Well, if the problem of censoring dangerous/immoral transactions is not solved internally, and in accordance with the Bitcoin Network rules/principles, foreign bodies will likely try to "solve" it the way they want. This's typically how societies that do not take what matter seriously or refuse to solve their own problems are taken over by foreign governments that have little to no respect for their values/laws.
I think Bitcoin Network could organize to prevent this if it has the right alternative solutions. Besides, if you have no idea what the ideals of Bitcoin/crypto are , how would you know how to properly defend the network or solve it problems.

Not long ago we saw the same thing if I'm not mistaken, a mining pool that only wanted to mine clean coins and only confirm and input into blocks  non-mixed coins. I doubt that was ever possible in the first place and it's just marketing tactics for a business to convince other businesses they know what they're doing. Bitcoin is like dollars in terms of them both being Fungible:P

Do you know how (or even if) they tag/identify their blocks? I can't find any blocks with the strings "blockseer", "seer", or "DCMNA" in the coinbase data.

We don't and neither really do they. Even the best blockchain analysis will not be perfected, as has been identified given they have already included some dark net transactions in their blocks.

True. Oh well, Monero it is then.

I agree it is not a viable solution, but this creeping surveillance and censorship concerns me. Exchanges - fine. They are a private business, they can enforce any rules they like on their users, and I can simply choose not to use them. But the network itself? They have absolutely no right to try to censor that.

I know but there is nothing stopping them from mining on your "censorship-free" chain as well and thereby censoring your new fork. As with everything that Bitcoin has done so far, any algorithm shift cannot take place overnight. I really wasn't implying that it would be done on a moments notice. Even a simple soft fork requires miners signaling which can take months, or even a year .

I would think that intentionally excluding blocks mined by specific miners would be far more dangerous. In the first place, identifying the blocks mined by them would be a difficult task if they remove any identification of it in the Coinbase. Reaching a consensus on which of the unidentified block to be excluded from the main chain would also be difficult. Miners orphaning blocks would also result in far lesser network security and possibly have to ensure that everyone waits for a few more confirmations, just like 2015's SPV mining.

Let me think for a moment...
Binance is an exchange, also has a mining pool, has frozen user funds for trying to send it to a wasabi wallet....
Did something happen? Was there a backlash and Binance was abandoned, nope, nothing.
Let's not even point to the shit Coinbase is doing or how Bitpay is asking your socks size when you want to purchase a damn 6$ item!

And there will be none as most of the userbase now doesn't give a damn about those things, they want to buy coins see that those coins have gained x10 in value, sell them and enjoy their fiat. And exchanges are making money out of those guys, not from you and me who are not keeping our coins there! On a local car forum there are some people discussing cryptocurrency investments, I rarely intervene for the simple fact there is no point doing so, all have invested in Bitcoin and some other coins with Revolut.....do you respect those to care about some things they don't understand?


We will probably never know unless you somehow end up receiving funds from a tainted address already known and it is mined via MARA.
It will always be a dilemma, are they really enforcing this, or if proved wrong it might simply be that their filters are bad?

I doubt anyone here will come and say, look here at my CM transaction that has been confirmed in a block mined by Marathon.

Possibly this is one of their marketing strategies to distinguish themselves from other mining pools which I think is not that brilliant because they are losing lots of money by rejecting transactions coming from the "blacklisted" address.  It is actually a good strategy if only they are not in the environment where censorship is frown upon.

Perhaps they could even send a government agent over to your house to verify your identity in person. What a great service! (/s)

Any exchange which signs up to something like this should be abandoned by users. An exchange working with hand in hand with a mining pool who are both working hand in hand with the US government to track and analyze all your transactions and information? And people are going to use that willingly!? Might as well just email all your master public keys to the NSA at that point.

The counter argument to that whole idea is that pools which aren't following such stupid rules could simply refuse to mine transactions from these exchanges. They won't be missing out on much given the exchanges would be purposefully using very low fees, and it means the exchange would end up waiting much longer for a confirmation to appear in the <1% of blocks that Marathon mines. Such an exchange would end up with a lot of angry customers who are waiting more than 24 hours for a withdrawal.

What if we include blocks mined by BlockSeer and DCMNA pools?  They claim to be "regulatory compliant" too, although I haven't heard much about them since their respective announcements.

Also, because I raised the question in the DCMNA topic, I'll repeat it here.  How do we know they are being as strict as they claim and not just making a gesture towards compliance so the authorities give them the benefit of the doubt?  How closely is anyone really looking?