The new mining pool, Marathon miners censoring Bitcoin transactions;

[Charles-Tim]

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.

Marathon Digital Holdings’ (MARA) new mining pool has mined a bitcoin (BTC, -2.01%) block that is “fully compliant with U.S. regulations,” meaning the company has started excluding transactions from entities it believes are sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Treasury or have been involved in dark web activity.

The Marathon OFAC pool, which was first announced in late March, “refrains from processing transactions from those listed on the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (SDN)” to stay “compliant with U.S. regulatory standards,” according to the company.

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.

“By excluding transactions between nefarious actors, we can provide investors and regulators with the peace of mind that the bitcoin we produce is ‘clean’, ethical and compliant with regulatory standards,” Marathon said in a statement.

Yet, this is not yet entirely true

Despite Marathon's efforts, transactions from a dark web market still made it into the block.

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

[2double0]

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

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?

[Upgrade00]

I started a topic about this company early this year and a user pointed out their desire to censor the network;

• Increased transparency as all financial information will be audited by a third-party U.S.-based financial audit firm
• Lobbying efforts to improve the policies and regulatory environment in North America for miners
• “Clean block mining” that adheres to the Office of Foreign Asset Control’s (OFAC’s) compliance standards and reduces the risk of mining blocks that include transactions linked to nefarious activities

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

[ranochigo]

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.

[DooMAD]

Shall we worry if it is only one in number?

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
DCMNA pool:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5310508.0


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

[bitmover]

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 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

[SFR10]

“By excluding transactions between nefarious actors, we can provide investors and regulators with the peace of mind that the bitcoin we produce is ‘clean’, ethical and compliant with regulatory standards,” Marathon said in a statement.

Yet, this is not yet entirely true

Despite Marathon's efforts, transactions from a dark web market still made it into the block.

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.}

[tbct_mt2]

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

[pooya87]

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 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

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.

[NeuroticFish]

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.

[bitbollo]

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.

[o_e_l_e_o]

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.

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.

[ranochigo]

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

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.

[dkbit98]

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.

[o_e_l_e_o]

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.

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.

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

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.

[dkbit98]

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 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.

[ranochigo]

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

[stompix]

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.
DCMNA pool:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5310508.0

DCMNA is Marathon group + DMG.

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

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 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.

They will not reach it till January next year, this is the schedule of deployment:

April 2021: 4,800 miners
May 2021: 1,800 miners
June 2021: 1,800 miners
July 2021: 1,800 miners
August 2021: 7,000 miners
September 2021: 8,100 miners
October 2021: 10,500 miners
November 2021: 14,700 miners
December 2021: 24,500 miners
January 2022: 15,200 miners

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.

[ReiMomo]

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.

[o_e_l_e_o]

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.

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%.

I'd assume a change from SHA256D to something else

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.