Marathon, one of the biggest bitcoin mining dedicated companies in the U.S. and Canada, has mined the first OFAC compliant bitcoin block, only accepting transactions that comply with the directives of this government office. This has caused a stir in libertarian circles, that argue this can be the start of censorship in the bitcoin blockchain at a mining level.
https://news.bitcoin.com/marathon-mines-first-ofac-compliant-bitcoin-block/What year is this?? That lasted full 24 days
"Marathon is committed to the core tenets of the Bitcoin community, including decentralization, inclusion, and no censorship," said Marathon's CEO Fred Thiel. "Over the coming week, we will be updating all our miners to the full standard Bitcoin core 0.21.1 node, including support for Taproot. By adopting the full standard Bitcoin core node, we will be validating transactions on the blockchain in the exact same way as all other miners who use the standard node."
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/marathon-to-stop-censoring-bitcoin-blocksPersonally I call bullshit on that.
If they're going to mine standard blocks it'll be more because they don't have enough people to maintain a monster-sized codebase with their own censorship additions AND fend off the security vulnerabilities all the while, rather than any change in morals they might have had.
I've been thinking one of these years, I start my own mining operation to offset any crap that Marathon runs on the network.
Nah it's neither morals nor technical, it's just about money. Try being competitive mining pool when you can only mine a subset of transactions that everybody else can. Like you you have to pass on a ton of well paying transactions and include scraps in your block just to see next miner pick them up and include in the next block on top of yours. Passing on financial incentives to someone else is never good for business