Topic: Why bitcoin is not censorship resistent. - page 3. (Read 412 times)

You're right, and I agree with you that there is no incentive for miners to get together and conspire a 51% attack. All their hard work and hardware investment will have been for nothing. It is highly unlikely that miners even know each other much when there are thousands of them (even companies) all over the world. It just doesn't make sense for the future of BTC or crypto which they're heavily invested in.

Like I said in my origin post miners won't use TOR to hide their internet connection. The bitcoin network is public. They can be only 2016 miners which are so easy to monitor which a usual home computer. You can track the location with a ip address as a normal person. And as a law enforcement agency even further. When a mining operation is a registered businnes with a huge facility then its no problem to get their ip address as a government or law enforcement.


In my origin post I referred to law enforcement agencies. Which are going after criminals. So I'm not referring to transactions from daily people. Please name me one constitution which protects criminals?


If the government of the country of your mining operation location is doing things like that then its your problem. A country with a democracy doesn't do something like that. So when your setting up a huge mining facility in country's like Iran you have to realize and accept the possible risk.  


I knew that you would come with P2Pool. I should have write about it earlier. The same problems as described in my origin post affect them.

Looks like you haven't read my post at all 

How do you monitor the network? If you use a different address per block and choose not to put any identifying information into the Coinbase, there is no way to track.

Which requires a majority, AKA. 51% attack. Censoring a transaction entails the fact that those transactions will never be confirmed, which means that you'll have to do a block re-org at some point to ensure that you will invalidate blocks from miners which don't have to follow the censorship regulations. It is impossible for the said enacted laws to be enforced worldwide. Certain countries has constitutional rights against censorship which would hold water in court.

How would you repurpose your million dollar ASIC farms after some local regulation forces you to attack Bitcoin. Censorships can be obvious, it's easy to monitor the network and realize that certain transactions with a high fees are not getting mined.  Do you sell your ASIC to someone else? Because your ASICs are certainly no longer profitable, all to comply with some local regulations. Not sure about the legality of the regulations in the first place.

Pools are not the only way to mine. P2Pool for example allows all to host their own pool which cannot be censored because it'll be decentralized. Solomining is still a thing with older hardware. Pools helps to mitigate the huge variations in mining income but it doesn't mean you absolutely have to mine with the pools.

This is pure non-sense.
Firstly, censorship-resistance ensures that protocol rules that govern how the network works are set in advance and can’t be retroactively altered to comply with a desired agenda, whatever it may be.
Secondly, there's no entity behind bitcoin hence you can't ask anyone to shut it down, roll back the blockchain, avoid others to transact and such.
Lastly, chances of a 51% attacks are so slim that only fools would go about that.

31 different addresses. I would have to monitor the network which would result in the same result. Miners could use for every transaction a different address which would be useless. You can still monitor the network and get the exact amount of different miners and which addresses is owned by who.


The miner just doesn't include a specific transaction. And if their are worldwide similar laws which forces every miner to do so then you don't need a 51% attack. I also can't agree on the economic part.


But all those thousands of mining devices are connected to a central mining pool. Which is as said a registered company, which has to follow every law and of which you can monitor his whole activity on the bitcoin network. When there's no mining pool server to connect to, then your local home miner is useless. There's no single reason why some daily workers with their home mining devices and large mining operations should start some "rebellious" actions.

As in the number of unique pools?

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Deliberate censorship of selected transactions involves a 51% attack which has serious economic repercussion to Bitcoin. Keeping that in mind, for miners who has invested millions of dollars into their own mining farms, will they execute a 51% attack to prevent confirmations of certain transactions to comply with the local regulations? Highly doubt so, by the fact that most of them hold a substantial amount of Bitcoins and their ASICs are worthless once this happens.

You are also measuring the number of unique entities by the number of (known) pools which has possibly thousands of different miners located in geographically diversed locations. Tracking each and every of them will be difficult and you cannot monitor the entire network as well.

I calculated the amount of miners who successfully created a block in the past 2016 period.

The amount was only 31 of possible 2016.

With more laws and regulations coming, the possible censorship of transactions of specific addresses is very likely.

Its very likely to see that there will be a system where law enforcement in cooperation with blockchain analyses firms, can send in a matter of seconds a black list via a jurisditcion order which forces all the current active miners to censor that specific address.  

Bitcoin is not censorship resistant and never will be. The same with bitcoin cash and every other forked from the original bitcoin blockchain.

Reasons why miners can't hide:

Today's mining is a very competitive industry. It went industrial. Almost every big mining operation from solo farms to mining pools are registered companies. Which already puts them under every active law and will put them under new ones. And a mining business will accept every new law because stopping their mining operation will cause them hundreds of millions of loses.

Mining in the shadows is not possible because you can't hide a big mining facility (electricity, storage etc.). You also can't hide a oil refinery.

For almost nothing (a few dollars) you can track and monitor the whole bitcoin network. Because there are currently about 30 of 2016 possible 2016 miners. Also 2016 would be nothing.

The monitoring and regulation of worldwide max. 2016 mining operations (probably way less) is for every government and law enforcement agency the easiest thing to do due to bitcoins structure and transparency.

The reason why miners will NEVER connect and send blocks via TOR is the simple fact that they would be so slow that their turnover would decrease by 15-20%. Like every other big billion dollar industrial sector the profit will be around 2-4%. So with that again, millions of dollars of loses.

The reason why monero is under heat and gets delisted is because its not compatible with current active laws. Its anonymous and not transparent.  

The transparency of bitcoin is very important.

The economic factors and its compatibility with law is what secures bitcoin. Not cryptography.

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EDIT:
This post just shows how things are. I wrote it in a neutral perspective. I don't that say that those things are good or things should go that way.