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The bitcoin creator, Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin mining to be permissionless and censorship resistant, but this newly created mining pool are now censoring Bitcoin transactions, making it to be permissioned protocol.


What is this mining pool driving at? Againsting the make up design of Bitcoin mining protocol?

Just to market their mining pool? That is obvious in the below quote.


Yet, this is not yet entirely true


https://www.coindesk.com/marathon-miners-censor-bitcoin-transactions-ofac-compliant

Shall we worry if it is only one in number? Or shall we worry that future mining operations are going to be affected by this?
It is against the protocol but when we are expecting regulations, centralization and permissioned mining will be imposed and it doesn't matter what we think/want as they are authorized people who ask this mining company to do that, or we don't know if their government is running this company to show us that they can censor the transactions?

I started a topic (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5312267.msg56187178#msg56187178) about this company early this year and a user pointed out their desire to censor the network;

The whole of the quoted part showed the companies game plan, but the highlighted area is more explicit.

Nothing new. The miners have always been able to do so and perhaps covertly by outright excluding certain types of transactions or certain transactions associated with nefarious activity.

If anything it proves that some pools are able to actively censor transactions at will. It will unlikely achieve anything beyond delaying confirmations by a block at most, given their fairly small network hashrate. Miners would probably not want to mine in a pools with censorship measures anyways, unless they support it too.

I'm not sure it is.  Looks like this might be the third one.  We've had two topics in the Press sub along a similar theme.

BlockSeer pool:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5288918.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5288918.0)
DCMNA pool:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5310508.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5310508.0)


//EDIT:  Possible false alarm, all three might be the same entity.

I agree, they will at most delay a few block confirmations.

Imo, it proves that a single  mining pool cannot really censor transactions.  

Will Marathon mark a block which contain a censored address as invalid, as it contains a censored transaction?
This is the only way to make this censorship effective.
That pool would basically fork the blockchain ignoring blocks which contained censored transactions
 They do not have the hashrate to do so withoutbecoming insignificant and losing a lot of money.. At least not yet, but they probably never will have such hashrate to do so.

However,  if a group of miners with 70% hashrate decided to do so... things would get really complicated

Not sure what they're smoking at Mara but AFAIK, there's no way to fully achieve what they've claimed; Personally, I see it as a marketing strategy of some sort ^{[indirect approach, even though they're censoring some TXs]}.
^{- Luckily there are enough "normal/levelheaded" pools out there to ignore the impact such useless pools could have as a whole.}

Nothing serious here. There are many mining pools and if the Marathon pool actually censors Bitcoin transactions, they only can do it with the waiting transactions in their mempool. Other pools, other nodes will confirm the transactions are censored by Marathon in later blocks.

How many percent the total hashrate of Marathon pool? They are not a big pool because I can not find their name here https://btc.com/stats/pool?pool_mode=month

No, it doesn't matter how much hashrate the group has. This kind of censorship can not take place on bitcoin network, at least not for long.

Basically there are only 2 scenarios where this kind of censorship happens.
1. By a very small group of miners (ie. a smaller % of the hashrate) by companies that are located in certain jurisdictions and cannot or will not move so they have to comply by the regulations and the government pressure. This does not affect the network at all.
This has always been happening. Like the case with MARA pool which is a tiny company with a tiny portion of the hashrate complying with malicious government rules.

2. By a much larger group of miners (ie. a much bigger % of the hashrate) which ends up disrupting the network but only for a short time because there is only 2 ways to move forward, the companies move to another jurisdiction or miners connect to another pool that is not malicious. Or the community is going to introduce a hardfork that bricks their billion dollar investment in one fell swoop.
I don't think this scenario will ever happen because miners who are making a bigger investment and taking a much bigger risk that regular people who just buy bitcoin, are more concerned about health of bitcoin and won't let that happen.

For now they don't matter. It can become something to worry about, since it has the seeds for any kind of censorship, and especially if much bigger hash rate goes there or to (future) similar pools, but I hope that pools and miners are smart enough to not go on this path.

Not only a marketing promotion but also a way to follow anti money laundering.
It's really able to detect these operations? I don't think so, there is always some error while doing such filtering operations.
 
Meanwhile, some years ago, dark web bitcoin (from silk road) have been already sold in a government auction, so I think it's something useless since they are just providing an additional rule for their operation.

This is assuming that the miners who are connecting to Marathon Pool or other similar pools are independent and will freely move to another pool. If Marathon or others continually invest in new mining equipment, subsidized by people buying their shares or even subsidized by the US government's desire to control bitcoin, it is not impossible for them and others to gain a majority of the hash rate using mining equipment which they own themselves and therefore will not move to another pool. If such a scenario came to pass, then bitcoin would no longer be censorship resistant as they could simply ignore any mined block which does not follow their rules.

And even if that never happens, it still sets a bad precedent by saying that bitcoin is non-fungible and that some bitcoin are less valuable than others.

Right, I think there were several mining pools with specific preferences for transactions and this is a similar case as well but with a far worse motives. This is more of a concern than what it appears to be.

With MARA's compliance to government rules, it also means that other mining pools within their respective jurisdiction could possibly be forced to comply with their own set of rules as well and that is not limited to censorship. If there isn't any repercussions to their actions, then we could possibly see more mining pools adopting such measures or worse still, having the farms come after such regulations as well. Once 51% of the network comes under said regulations, something needs to be done urgently. Hopefully, that doesn't happen but it is still a possibility.

I don't know what exact size of Marathon pool is but I guess their share percentage is below 0.1% of total hashrate and it is more like statistical error,
but it's dangerous thing if they become bigger and if other North American pools start to follow their example.
Funny thing happened few days ago and random people started to send Bitcoins to their address to make it ''dirty'', and Iran is doing something similar because they only allow transactions for Bitcoin that is mined in Iran.
I have no idea how they could control something like this but analytics and tracking is getting better every day so we need to think about this and find some solution for this.
Real problem here is the question of Bitcoin fungibility, because if one pool or one country or some dictator can censor and blacklist any address than it would mean that not all Bitcoin is the same for them.
Horror scenario would be that each country has it's own Bitcoin and cross border transactions are not allowed.

If it were to happen, the network would undoubtedly fork. You would have Marathon and the like mining on their "clean" chain, and everyone who is being excluded by them mining on the original chain. What happens after that is anybody's guess. The price of bitcoin and the share price of these companies would both take a huge hit I'm sure, but probably both chains would continue to the exist. The "clean" chain would be little more than something like XRP at that point - centralized, not censorship resistant, and under control of the banks and the government. We shouldn't let it come to that. We need everyone to spread the word that Marathon are anti-bitcoin and investors need to pull their money out as soon as possible. If they are successful in their goal they will kill bitcoin and therefore kill their own revenue model, and so anyone holding shares in that company will lose all their money. We need more mining pools using Stratum V2. And most of all, if everyone just extensively used the privacy enhancing tools available to them - mixing, coinjoining, trading peer to peer, etc. - then the blockchain analysis that Marathon are basing their decisions on becomes worthless and their whole business model collapses.

The nuclear option would be for all the other mining pools to ignore blocks mined by Marathon, mine a different block at the same height, and make all Marathon's blocks stale. They would quickly go out of business when all their mined blocks bring them no profit.

They claim that they are on track to reach 10 EH/s in this first wave of their roll out, which would give them around 5-6% of the total hashrate at current levels.

I doubt that's actually true because I checked several sources that track Bitcoin mining pools real time and there is no trace on Marathon pool.
According to BTC.com stats (https://explorer.btc.com/btc/insights-pools) ArkPool is the smallest detected pool with 0.19% of total hashrate with 331.97 PH/s, and FoundryUSA is currently the biggest North American pool with 2.78% or 4.98 EH/s hashrate.
If I am not mistaken I think they mined only one block so far, that confirms my theory because they would mine more blocks with bigger hashrate.

This is too dangerous to be executed so the former is probably the only thing that should happen. I'd assume a change from SHA256D to something else, there isn't anything preventing them from mining on the new chain either.

Most block explorers do not classify the blocks mined by Marathon pool yet. You would have to look at the hashrate of those in the unknown instead. The problem with having a small amount of hashrate is that you're subjected to far more variance than others and you have to wait quite a while for it to be considered accurate at all.

They're also still in the process of deploying, AFAIK.

DCMNA is Marathon group + DMG.


They haven't yet started mining completely with their own pool, the launch was supposed to happen on May the 1st and open to other miners in June but they postponed the launch. Till now they have received only 10k of their order with Bitmain but they do have a 100k miner order with them till January 2022.
https://blog.bitmain.com/en/marathon-patent-group-purchases-additional-70000-19-series-miners-from-bitmain/


They will not reach it till January next year, this is the schedule of deployment (https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2021/04/05/2204284/0/en/Marathon-Digital-Holdings-Announces-Bitcoin-Production-and-Mining-Operation-Updates-for-the-First-Quarter-of-2021.html):


Basically, Bitmain can't produce enough miners for everyone that has placed an order so it's far likely that the hashrate will not increase in the coming year with more than 25-50% maximum, their 6% would still be a problem.

In my own opinion!

These people are business people, they really know what terms/words to use in order to gain trust and close deals, investor, sales, and partnerships. They just created a way on how to would stand out from their competitors and become more secured.

But honestly, I can tell that these people can still have transactions with dirty blocks, even though they are able to trace the people who were blacklisted and don't transact with them they can still mine stuff that came from dirt. That is the trust.

Well, I don’t really think that Government doesn’t have stakes in this company. This company is too privileged, I find it like that.

I can find 5 more blocks they have successfully mined in the last 4 days since their first publicly announced block. Their 6 blocks are as follows:
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/682170
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/682472
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/682537
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/682593
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/682816
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/682843

That's 6 blocks out of 674, which is just less than 1%.

That's a whole different topic! What would happen to security of the network if you suddenly rendered every ASIC in existence useless for mining bitcoin? It could be the best thing to ever happen to Bcash as all these ASICs would presumably start mining that if it was profitable, and so Bcash won't be so insecure and susceptible to 51% attacks, at least for a while. Any change away from SHA256 needs to be carefully planned over several years.

I don't think it will be good for them either.
Bcash has roughly 1/15 of the reward Bitcoin has if we exclude fees so unless the change in Bitcoin's algorithm is some translated into Bcash price, for which I see no reason to come true,  a lot of the gear will simply turn to scrap metal and you could buy them at $ per ton, not per hashrate so anyone with a few million could simply grab that and destroy the coin.

My biggest concern with Marathon is that they might change their way of doing things so rather than blacklist they will resort to whitelists, collaborating with exchanges and offering them confirmations at low fees, and processing only transactions from "clean" registered addresses. That would be indeed troublesome.

Anyhow, a change from SHA256 to something else? Not going to happen, not this decade at least!

Yeah, looks like that is true, but for example FoundryUSA so far mined 14 blocks while Mara claim's to be bigger than FoundryUSA, and I would not be surprised to find some secret connections that Marathon has with irs, cia and some other government agencies.
My wild theory say that this would be some infiltration and attack from inside, because they realized that Bitcoin can't be attacked so effectively from outside.

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 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5310508.msg56154462#msg56154462), 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?

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.

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.

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. ;D

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 :P.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

Sounds like Marathon have now changed their stance on censoring transactions (https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/marathon-signals-for-taproot-1030479274).  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?

Good news for sure, but am I missing something here? Why does Taproot prevent them from filtering transactions like they are currently doing? Taproot doesn't hide which addresses bitcoin is coming from or going to, it doesn't hide if the bitcoin in question has come from a darknet market, it doesn't hide if the bitcoin in question has been coinjoined, and so on. Why can't they continue to filter after Taproot?

This is the biggest lie I've read in crypto since Brian Armstrong said that he was committed to "bringing economic freedom" to the world, while he is busy using blockchain analysis technology to spy on you and hand your data over to governments and third parties. If they were actually committed to no censorship, then they wouldn't be censoring transactions. ::)

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.

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

Either they "finally" realized it was a useless plan or everything was just a marketing strategy ^{[as I mentioned before (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5336374.msg56976887#msg56976887)]} of some sort.
^{- It's amazing how quickly people change their stance nowadays ::)}

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.

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.

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.

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.!

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.