Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Merits 1 from 1 user
Re: OFAC-Sanctioned Transactions Being Censored
by
DaveF
on 26/11/2023, 13:39:58 UTC
⭐ Merited by stompix (1)
In summary, the report concludes that these transactions were likely intentionally filtered by F2Pool, This raises the question of why F2Pool, a pool with origins in Asia, is the first pool to filter transactions based on US OFAC sanctions, especially considering that other transactions with similar or lower fee rates were included

And in typical American fashion, American companies may be given a no-gag order, obey quietly or else...
So you can just choose what State will enforce their rules, depending on where the pool is.

Unless some pool starts operating in the "dark web" (tor hidden/i2p, etc) or such, with anonymous use like ckpool does for solo. But what if those operators do a rug pull? It happened in the past in the clear net...

Maybe a REAL pool operated in El Salvador or some country favorable to Bitcoin? (not a whitelabel from yet another American company).
Funnily enough most OFAC sancitoned transactions that were dropped by F2POOl were mined by the Foundry Digital. The private close ended pool that runs exclusively for an alliance of north American miners that are to a large extent U.S. public companies. I guess this is just by chance mostly since these guys are the biggest pool lately, but it goes to show that at least for now, FEDs haven't cared to force any miner's hand at enforcing their censorship list on miners and mining pools for bitcoin.

Although it's a very real possibility, I don't think the laundering happening through bitcoin is significant enough to warrant the government's attention to that extent. They'd waste too many resources and anger a community that's quite big so they've probably purposely avoided this. Or they've just not gotten around this yet. Probably good idea to not have good faith towards FEDs.

Which goes back to what I said that pools are business run by people. Their opinions of what to mine may or may not mesh up with yours.

Example, a lot of people here give Foundry a hard time, the operators get annoyed and start to not mine TXs form people whos addresses are public here. (sig campaigns, sales of things, and so on) It's their right, it's their pool. We have no say in it. No government, no OFAC, just FU to Bitcointalk users. The true free enterprise open market people would say 'good it's a private business they can do what they want' the true libertarians would say  'good it's a private business they can do what they want'.

But I have a strong suspicion that a lot of people would come here and cry 'wah wah wah the mean old pool operator is not mining our TXs'

-Dave