Topic: Why bitcoin is not censorship resistent. - page 2. (Read 444 times)

Since the beginning of bitcoin not even a hundred different people/organizations mined a block. So there were never more than 100 miners since 2008.

Today its about 30. And that is mining centralization. And that's a good thing, and not a bad thing at all. The cost of mining and the cost of million dollar infrastructure which makes it to expensive to cheat makes bitcoin secure. The bitcoin network is secured by economic, and not by cryptography.

That's the problem with all those raspberry pi nodes. They don't affect the network in any way, besides making it just slower. Blockchains in general should not be designed to run on a desktop pc and certainly not on a raspberry pi. Full nodes (mining) should only run by people or companies who can afford the big infrastructure. Doesn't matter if mining pool or mining facility. That's why the 1MB block size limit of BTC is the worst thing you can do. 1MB blocks just that some people can run them on their small device and think their now a "rebel" or something similar. I don't want small nodes who only damage the network. I want big miner who mine terabyte blocks.

I believe it should've been
Anonymous and Transparent. Users could be anonymous if they choose to. Anonymity is a Right as long as the Anonymous Users can always be tracked whenever serious crime is committed by them.

In regards to Bitcoin not being Censorship Resistant due to the reason given, I think if the mining/consensus hardware are portable, mobile and easy to carry around, that will greatly contribute/improve its Censorship resistant feature, as it was meant to be by Satoshi. Bitcoin is meant to be very Censorship Resistant... The censorship resistant feature can be improved and maintained if the users insist on well decentralized participation on the network. The Network, Nodes/mining,  Network Consensus, Software , Regulations , etc should be well decentralized, anonymity-friendly/privacy-friendly, very transparent, etc

No regulation can force a miner to control what other miners do.

You are saying that a supposed regulation, which doesn't exist, that would force miners to orphan blocks which contain transactions not mined by them. You are basically saying that a regulation would force miners to make a 51% attack on the network, which they can't do because they do not have the hash power.

Based on that supposed regulation which doesn't exist, a mining centralization of 4 miners which also doesn't exist, you are saying that bitcoin is not censorship resistant...

You two are just spreading misinformation, or talking about things you don't fully understand.


Even if the majority of the 4 biggest mining pools decided to blacklist an address they would need to have 51% of hashpower (but they wouldn't, because small miners would move their hashrate to another pool).
 2 other big pools could mine 2 subsequent blocks with that "blacklisted" addresses transaction.

Then the 4 mining pools would be 2 blocks behind, in the shortest chain. They would have to outpace the longest chain, creating a parallel blockchain, competing with the rest of the network. This would literally be an attempt to do a 51% attack, but miners would be slowing move their hashpower to the longest chain, as they wouldn't like to lose money in the shortest chain...

That odds of that to happen are very low. Basically for nothing, as no regulation could do anything against those miners as they didn't mine the block containing the blacklisted address. (also, that regulation doesn't even exist)

Bigger miners are just ... big and therefore need to follow any regulation to lower ANY risks

Just think from their side, running business, need banks and electricity and ppl and ....

There are only 3-4 miners that big - just enough to decide on what's needed

I decided to dig into this subject a little more.

I looked into an Antonopoulos video exactly about this subject here

Begins at 34minutes.

He explains that to consistently block transaction from an address there should have been a group of miners with 51% hash power. Those miners would need to refuse to add transactions from those addresses AND to orphan blocks that include transactions from that addresses. This would be litteraly a 51% attack, coordinate globally.

So, practically impossible.

To summary:


I think you should watch it.

I'm not an expert,but here's my hypothesis.I might be wrong.
If a miner or a group of miners decides to block transactions for their own benefit(or to comply with regulations or government will),then the majority of developers and users inside the Bitcoin Core network will just hardfork and split the BTC core blockchain,leaving all those miners with worthless forked pseudo-Bitcoin shitcoins and no market support.
The Bitcoin community is more flexible and adaptive than you think.I don't get your point of asking a question that has been discussed 100 times before on the forum.Just search for some old threads about this topic,instead of creating your thread.

Since miners are the only nodes who can 'earn' the powerful write access to build on top of the existing longest block-chain database and that is in a very hot competition with other miners to earn real physical money (pay bills in real world)  - yes, there is a natural limit for such nodes as everywhere and models like pareto distribution fits to that quite ok

Also they need to have selective / low latency connections to other miners to push their new blocks in case of any success / new block - so either push out own  new block that others confirm it by mining on top (only than you final own it)  or get (bad) info quickly that update happend >> start mining new!


The dynamics of that very interesing process should be modelled in some PhD works for stochastic processes in open dissipative dynamic systems having strict natural / consensus border conditions - sounds great fun    More fun: I expect any other read / 'relay' node (not mining / writing granted) will slow down miners ...

  

Blockchain censorship via majority has been known for a long time, it basically comes to whether all the governments in the world would be able to cooperate to enforce such thing. For example, a lot of hash power is still in China, and China will refuse to blacklist adresses of its allies like North Korea or Venezuela if Western powers would demand it.

That's not a definition I agree with but I don't think that's very relevant here. Pools do not have to be regulated or registered. Anyone can run a pool, public or private and it's very easy to be able to make it hard to detect. Not through Tor or any VPN connection. SSL with stratum on a non-public pool with the shares being submitted to a different server that is used to broadcast the blocks makes it practically impossible to detect.
Yes. But the truth is people still cares. Bitcoin is designed to be censorship resistant in mind; breaking this tenet will inevitably make people lose trust in it. The scenario is not an Apples to Apples comparison. Truth is, there are loads of people that use Bitcoin to protect their privacy, to circumvent payment restrictions. If there are any signs of any government control over Bitcoin, I'm certain that the price would immediately crash and perhaps never return as people search for alternatives.

The network is decentralized, nobody has the power to "blacklist" an address the way you are talking about.

If 10 mining pools decide to blacklist an address,  there would be still about 10 pools mining blocks everyday. Soon some pool would confirme that transaction , as it is valid. This is why bitcoin is censorship resistant,  nobody controls it .

We've already seen pools that are volunteering to be regulatory-compliant.  I guess we'll see how successful/unsuccessful those are before we worry about the theoretical threat from forced compliance.  If push came to shove, I could see temporary pools forming and disbanding on a regular basis to play a game of whack-a-mole with law enforcement.

1 - 2. No miner is not online 24/7. No mining pool or large mining facility can do that. That would kill their business. And please read my origin post carefully, I don't about talk about simple nodes running on a raspberry pi. Also a node is not a miner.
Every miner tries to connect to everyone on the bitcoin network and get every transactions. That a miner doesn't have a specific transaction in his mempool is very unlikely. And if so he could just ask some of his peers.
3. That's exactly how bitcoin is today so I don't know what you want to say with that.

A bit off topic : That's why in general many apps from very good programmers which are better than existing ones but don't go to the masses because they don't think how an average consumer works and thinks and the app is to complicated or many other reasons.

See my post about the lightning network:

Yes there could be ten of thousands trying to mine. But you can only call yourself a miner when you mined a block in that difficulty period. So all the others who don't in that difficulty period are not a miner even if they run millions of mining devices. And if every mining operation has to be a registered company (large facility or mining pool, not local home machine) they also have to follow the rules. If 30 or 1 Million have to follow the rules doesn't change anything.


I agree that it is indeed difficult. There will never by where all countries agree or have the same law with every single line the same. But overall it will be similar. Most countries have similar regulations and rules on running a legit cannabis production or trade company. In every beginning of every new industry the laws and regulations are not the same as after a period of time. I don't say miners have to blacklist a specific transaction tomorrow. It could take years.


I know what you saying but you have to look out there. A PayPal user for example (or average user) doesn't stop using it because some funds are got frozen from some criminal or accidentally from a normal user. Even if there would be huge headlines. The reality is that they don't even care. PayPal works. That's what people care about. If they hold your private keys and you can't access them? People don't care. Not just because they don't know how bitcoin works.

[quote author=bitmover link=topic=5315341.msg56290270#msg56290270 date=1612702752
And what can you do with a jurisdiction order? can you paste the juridisction order ID in electrum and get the bitcoin from miners?
[/quote]

An unnecessary testy statement. Please think before posting.


Don't get that, sorry. I never said something like miners get their addresses blacklisted. If you mean a miner gets black listed from the rest of the network please read my posts above about network monitoring answering things like "just put a other address into coinbase".

[quote author=bitmover link=topic=5315341.msg56290270#msg56290270 date=1612702752
As for the old ones, which are blacklisted, just sent the BTC from those addresses to a mixer and the coins will be anonymous again.
[/quote]

You can't send bitcoins to anywhere if your addresses is blacklisted and will never get confirmed.

There can only be a maximum of 2016 blocks in a difficulty period. There are certainly more than 2016 miners. Can you get the IP of this block? 00000000000000000000ce9a189699570401c2503524b690aa92f6fedd9dcf59. Without looking at the information being put in the Coinbase of course. I don't dispute that large mining operations are difficult to uncover, that's pretty obvious.

Certainly hope there isn't any! Having effective legislation is difficult enough, but having similar policies across all the countries worldwide? That is the point, I don't see it being possible for every government in the world to collectively agree on and decide to force miners to do something they want.

No. What do you do after the price crashes when people realizes that miners are actively censoring transactions? You've mentioned that Bitcoin functions on game theory and I agree completely with that. So what happens then?

How? Is it easy to ban all the IPs running P2Pool? It is easy to solomine as well.

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I maintain that an effective censorship IS a majority attack on the network.

Basically you want Bitcoin protocol/node to force miner include all transaction on mempool, but there are many technical difficulty such as,
1. Each node have different mempool, which means each mempool have different transaction on it's mempool
2. Not all node online 24/7, which means there's no way knowing if miner include all transaction on mempool
3. How should the protocol/node react if block size isn't enough to include all transaction on mempool?

And what can you do with a jurisdiction order? can you paste the juridisction order ID in electrum and get the bitcoin from miners?

Jurisdiction order are worthless in the blockchain. This is one reason why it is censorship resistant.

Additionally, even if all miners have their past addresses black listed, they could just create new ones, for free.

As for the old ones, which are blacklisted, just sent the BTC from those addresses to a mixer and the coins will be anonymous again.

Why are you all talking about 51% Attacks? And why using the words like conspire? Please read my origin post.