2023-11-25 14:34:12
The Bitcoin community was completely outraged by the news that a non-US mining pool had barred transactions sanctioned by the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Bitcoin developer 0xB10c first posted about it on November 20, that according to his project that monitors mining pools, he reported six blocked transactions in September and October. It quickly became clear that the two transactions reported from the pools of ViaBTC and Foundry were false positives. But four transactions were actually excluded from blocks. Censorship of a Bitcoin mining pool means nothing This would be the first time that a non-US mining player is trying to comply with US sanctions. Incidentally, the affected mining pool is the Chinese F2Pool. One of the pool’s founders, Chun Wang, confirmed the news on X, posting that their filter function had been turned off. He also wrote that this is only temporary “until the community reaches a more comprehensive consensus on the subject”. A now-deleted social media post by Wang also revealed that F2Pool reserves every right not to confirm transactions from, say, Putin or Jinping. Of course, blocks complying with OFAC sanctions are not so rare in the cryptosphere, but the news was shocking only in relation to Bitcoin. Because, for example, according to MEV Watch, only 32% of all Ethereum blocks comply with OFAC sanctions, which is a significant drop from 51% in August. Sanctioning and censoring transactions is a particularly divisive issue in crypto. For example, according to one of the managers of BlockTower capital, Ari Paul, the current action of F2Pool represents a particularly significant risk. Others think the same and believe that the solution is for the miners to “vote with their feet”, i.e. leave the pool. Plus, it would be important for all users to use mixing services and encryption tools in the fight against censorship. If possible, because we see that governments and authorities have started to fight against these services. Consider the case of Tornado Cash. The trend is therefore worth watching, but 0xB10c himself drew attention to the fact that the transaction filtering of a single pool means nothing for the Bitcoin network as a whole.
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