The new mining pool, Marathon miners censoring Bitcoin transactions;

[stompix]

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!

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[dkbit98]

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

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.

[DooMAD]

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%.

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, 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?

[o_e_l_e_o]

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.

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.

[serjent05]

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.}

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.

[stompix]

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!?

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?

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?

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.

[ranochigo]

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 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 .

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.

[o_e_l_e_o]

What if we include blocks mined by BlockSeer and DCMNA pools?

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.

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?

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.

I know but there is nothing stopping them from mining on your "censorship-free" chain as well and thereby censoring your new fork.

True. Oh well, Monero it is then.

I would think that intentionally excluding blocks mined by specific miners would be far more dangerous.

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.

[slaman29]

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

[Ucy]

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.

[DooMAD]

What if we include blocks mined by BlockSeer and DCMNA pools?

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.

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.

[NelfiNovita]

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.

[o_e_l_e_o]

I see their goal is good

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...

[DooMAD]

Sounds like Marathon have now changed their stance on censoring transactions.  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?

[o_e_l_e_o]

Marathon will adopt the update without modification. As a result, Marathon’s mining pool, MaraPool, will no longer filter transactions. Once the update is complete, the pool will begin validating transactions in a manner consistent with all other miners who use the standard node.

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?

“Marathon is committed to the core tenets of the Bitcoin community, including decentralization, inclusion, and no censorship,” said Fred Thiel, Marathon’s CEO.

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.

Is it possible the recent price drop caught them off guard and interfered with their profit margins?

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.

[titular]

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.

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

[SFR10]

Do we think this was an ethical decision?  Or a financial one?

Either they "finally" realized it was a useless plan or everything was just a marketing strategy ^{[as I mentioned before]} of some sort.
^{- It's amazing how quickly people change their stance nowadays}

[ranochigo]

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?

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.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Likely just a decision that they've made and has nothing to do with Taproot.

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.

[ranochigo]

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.