Why bitcoin is not censorship resistent.

[?QuestionMark?]

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.

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. 

[1715249329]

1715249329

[1715249329]

1715249329

[ranochigo]

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

The amount was only 31 of possible 2016.

As in the number of unique pools?

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.

[?QuestionMark?]

I calculated the amount of miners who successfully created a block in the past 2016 period.
The amount was only 31 of possible 2016.

As in the number of unique pools?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Karartma1]

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

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

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.

[ranochigo]

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 miners and which addresses is owned by who.

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.

The miner just don'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.

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.

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.

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.

[?QuestionMark?]

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

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

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.

Looks like you haven't read my post at all 

[?QuestionMark?]

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 miners and which addresses is owned by who.

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.

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.

The miner just don'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.

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.

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?

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.

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.  

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.

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.

[DarkDays]

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

The amount was only 31 of possible 2016.

As in the number of unique pools?

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'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.

[?QuestionMark?]

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

The amount was only 31 of possible 2016.

As in the number of unique pools?

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'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.

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

[bitmover]

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.  

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.

[ranochigo]

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.  

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?

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.

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

Why are you all talking about 51% Attacks?

A majority attack (usually labeled 51% attack or >50% attack) is an attack on the network.

Prevent some or all transactions from gaining any confirmations

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

[?QuestionMark?]

[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.

Again, please read my origin post. I never said that they affect the blockchain directly.

[quote author=bitmover link=topic=5315341.msg56290270#msg56290270 date=1612702752
Additionally, even if all miners have their past addresses black listed, they could just create new ones, for free.

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.

[?QuestionMark?]

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.  

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?

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.

[?QuestionMark?]

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.  

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?

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.

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:

There should an online learning academy that will spread the word about it and teach the peoples. Otherwise, it would gain faith.

Sorry but no way that will work. People want that everything works easy and that it just works. As long it's a product or something that's used in daily life and they have a current product, people don' want to put effort and time into it. I don't think people went to academies for using services like PayPal or whatsapp, or how to use a mobile phone. People don't have time for that. Good teaching is when the brain uses an app or a service and after 2-5 mins you know how it works by heart, and you know it's better than the product you used before. That's why apps like PayPal are so successful.
Why should an average bitcoin user waste time and change? Besides the real problems like payment hub centralization, regulations and the thing in general with side chains of bitcoin controlled by for profit companies, its not user friendly and harder to understand and use.

[?QuestionMark?]

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?

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.

[DooMAD]

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.

[bitmover]

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

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 .

[ranochigo]

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.

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.

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.

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.

[hatshepsut93]

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.

[hv_]

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 ...