6 ms·

Bitcoin is not uncensorable. Miners have the ability to censor transactions based on the sender/receiver/amount.

Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
Correct, but this requires miner collusion. If just one miner says no (or isn't contactable by the colluding party) then the transaction can make it into a block. If this ever became a practical issue, which I doubt, then censored people would only need to switch to any coin that supports stealth addresses. Edit: I also suppose, the colluding miners could also try to mine a competing fork to censor a block. This would be rightfully called out as a 51% attack attempt, though.
xur17 6y ago
Has there ever been a case where this occurred (with a market clearing mining fee is included)? You only need one miner to include the transaction.
- jnwatson 6y ago
  Yes. Treasury has tried to tighten the screws somewhat. [1] *. https://www.clearytradewatch.com/2018/12/ofac-lists-digital-currency-addresses-first-time-releases-new-guidance/ https://www.clearytradewatch.com/2018/12/ofac-lists-digital-... You are correct that you only need one miner, but that miner has to win a block.
- kolinko 6y ago
  There’s a ton, actually. Bitcoin has a system of “standard” transactions, that is the ones that are accepted by miners, vs. “valid” transactions that are accepted by nodes. Any nonstandard transaction will be rejected by 90 if not 100%, miners, but if you get lucky to get someone to mine it, it will work fine with the protocol. The nonstandard txs are any that are something more than a transfer, multisig (i.e. the ones that have some sort of smart contract capability). This is not theoretical - literally killed my project of decentralised oracles (Orisi) back in 2014. Our beta transactions were accepted only by 10% of miners, so you had to wait for hours to get your tx through. Perhaps it changed - I think in 2018 not even one mining pool accepted that, but perhaps by now they fixed it, although I doubt that. May seem like a small thing, but I met other projects that bumped into it. They had the tech, just didn’t manage to convinve miners to accept their transactions.
  - qertoip 6y ago
    You are correct about "standard valid" vs "non-standard valid" distinction in Bitcoin. You are incorrect about what constitutes a standard. The "smart contracts" by their own are standard - the whole Lightning Network is based on smart contracts - as well as many other protocols running live for years. It sounds more like your specific transactions were non-standard due to excessive size, usage of non-standard opcodes, or other technical quirks.
    - kolinko 6y ago
      Nope, before Bitcoin core 0.9.2 any script besides 3-4 default templates was considered non-standard. Regular opcodes, any size. We had a basic script that verified 3 out of 4 multisig, and that was non-standard, because the only standard multisig was 2 out of 3. But this was 2014, so it may have been before your time.
kim0 6y ago
If you're interested in a fungible currency, checkout Monero. A true grassroots cypherpunk project.
- stevespang 6y ago
  Is it true that miners of Monero cannot censor it ?
  - RandomBacon 6y ago
    Monero miners cannot see the sender address, the receiver address, or the transaction amount. I don't know if they finished Dandelion which is supposed to remove the link between the transaction and the IP submitting it. As far as I know, without Dandelion, it can be censored by IP address if the people running the miners are paying attention to that part of the network, otherwise Monero cannot be censored like Bitcoin can be.
    - ajkdhcb2 6y ago
      Dandelion is running now
  - Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
    When no transaction information is given, all transactions are indistinguishable. Isn't privacy beautiful?
  - qertoip 6y ago
    Correct. There is no meaningful basis for censorship in a Monero transaction. The sender, amount, receiver and IP address are all essentially hidden or unavailable. Miner can still decide to censor all transactions, random transactions, transactions over certain KB size, etc - but that is probably not very useful, except maybe to attack the network as a whole.
- nosuchthing 6y ago
  Grassroots? Do you even know the history of Monero? Unfortunately Monero was intentionally designed to dump the money supply, so the vast majority of XRM was "mined" by a small group of traditional speculative capitalists. Monero just amplifies the current plutocracy of the money system due to the algorithm of the emission curve and mining system. It would be nice if there wasn't a crypto project that didn't try to scam people. https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/242/how-was-the-monero-emission-curve-chosen https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/242/how-was-the-m... https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/858/monero-origins-optimized-crippled-miner https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/858/monero-origin...
ArchD 6y ago
Please elaborate on this nonsensical-sounding statement that perhaps is just easy to misunderstand. 'Miners' is not one person or organization with special authority, so what do you even mean by censorship? Anyone can be a miner and the decision of what gets included in the next block is determined by a competition of hashing (computing) power.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 6y ago
  There is something of a precedent for this when Luke Jr. tried to blacklist addresses he found morally objectionable. https://bitcoinexchangeguide.com/bitcoin-gentoo-client-takeover-attempt-by-btc-developer-luke-jr-again/ https://bitcoinexchangeguide.com/bitcoin-gentoo-client-takeo... Obviously this is a developer issue, not a miner issue. It really does not make sense that a miner would attempt to blacklist any addresses, as they could only delay transactions proportional to their hash power.
- kristianp 6y ago
  Miners can choose which transactions go into their blocks. If enough of them agree to a certain action, chances are one of them will be the successful miner of the block.
  - ArchD 6y ago
    And what's the mechanism for them to want to collude?
    - RandomBacon 6y ago
      Threat of violence by governments?
    - kristianp 6y ago
      Social norms, e.g. they might decide to refund someone who accidentally paid a huge fee for a transaction.
nfin 6y ago
it is not uncensorable in an absolute term, that is true. But can come quite close. Why? For mainly two reasons: 1) Main one: Miners can censor. But miners are not elected. As more transactions are censored by a mojority of miners, the sum of transaction fees of these transactions add up and become a honeypot/incentive. A sum which a "brave" miner could additionally include in a block they would mine (that other miners censoring won't), making themselves MORE profitable by including those. And mining being a low margin business, this is relevant. And this gets more and more relevant the more fees people are ready to pay for such transactions. Nothing is really free in life. It would cost, but the more you are ready to pay a fee, the more uncensorable it gets (if you are not the only one, which is not likely in a long term view in a world with so many countries, minorities, use cases,... ). The condition for this to work, is a) being able to mine anonymously (or one day you'll get arrested) and b) a protocol favoring decentralization (meaning you can have temporarily more centralization like these days, but as long as these more centr. miners behave well and follow the rules, it isn't an issue, and when they start behaving bad, things can get better again [1]). That is why privacy + decentralization-focused bitcoin-software development is so important 2) The second reason is technically correct, but a bit far fetched I have to admit (!), but read to the end: - You can become a miner. Ok, you would need to buy an ASIC or better a few, but with that you finally might get lucky and mine your block with those transactions. - But then again communities could get together and mine together. Like a small town (somewhere hypothetically where some plant grows and producing healthy drugs that are forbidden by law but helping some people who want to pay for that) and thus getting connected to a world wide financial infrastructure to participate in world wide commerce. Or countless other communities are imaginable. It just needs imagination, human creativity and time to develop those scenarios. [1] Example where it has already happened: - Bitcoin had moments where one miner got or got near 51% POW, and miners did switch mininig-pools to stop that. - possibly segwit2x (not entirely sure). Although Segwit2x was circumvented by a user activated softfork, an agreement of a big part of miners wanted to change the rules, but couldn't pull it of edit 1: formatting edit 2: some clarifications
- zxcmx 6y ago
  Also in practical terms how exactly would you censor "sci-hub" if you wanted to? They could generate a new address for each transaction and amounts could vary.
wslh 6y ago
Show me one censored transaction please. Miners should collude to censor transactions and there are hundreds of thousands of miners.
- Thorentis 6y ago
  OP said "not uncensorable" meaning it is possible to censor using Bitcoin. This in itself is a problem. Just because it hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean it can't. Tor was a DoD project, and so I automatically assume that it is possible for them to control enough exit nodes for them to control traffic. Even if it doesn't happen in practice, it is actually possible for anybody to do. Same with Bitcoin. Got a big enough budget, you can start censoring transactions. Bitcoin is not anonymous, Bitcoin is not private, Bitcoin is not censorship resistant.
  - wslh 6y ago
    I never said it was unsensorable. Try other arguments. The uncensorable is a spectrum so it is censorship resistant under certain premises. No technology is uncensorable with enough resources but Bitcoin is more uncensorable that the global banking system.
    - Thorentis 6y ago
      If you set the bar low enough, anything is more uncensorable.
  - sekai 6y ago
    Been doing just fine for 10 years.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
max_ 6y ago
The game theory would not permit this since the miners are rotated every 10 minutes.

Correct, but this requires miner collusion. If just one miner says no (or isn't contactable by the colluding party) then the transaction can make it into a block. If this ever became a practical issue, which I doubt, then censored people would only need to switch to any coin that supports stealth addresses. Edit: I also suppose, the colluding miners could also try to mine a competing fork to censor a block. This would be rightfully called out as a 51% attack attempt, though.

xur17 6y ago

Has there ever been a case where this occurred (with a market clearing mining fee is included)? You only need one miner to include the transaction.

jnwatson 6y ago
Yes. Treasury has tried to tighten the screws somewhat. [1] *. https://www.clearytradewatch.com/2018/12/ofac-lists-digital-currency-addresses-first-time-releases-new-guidance/ https://www.clearytradewatch.com/2018/12/ofac-lists-digital-... You are correct that you only need one miner, but that miner has to win a block.
kolinko 6y ago
There’s a ton, actually. Bitcoin has a system of “standard” transactions, that is the ones that are accepted by miners, vs. “valid” transactions that are accepted by nodes. Any nonstandard transaction will be rejected by 90 if not 100%, miners, but if you get lucky to get someone to mine it, it will work fine with the protocol. The nonstandard txs are any that are something more than a transfer, multisig (i.e. the ones that have some sort of smart contract capability). This is not theoretical - literally killed my project of decentralised oracles (Orisi) back in 2014. Our beta transactions were accepted only by 10% of miners, so you had to wait for hours to get your tx through. Perhaps it changed - I think in 2018 not even one mining pool accepted that, but perhaps by now they fixed it, although I doubt that. May seem like a small thing, but I met other projects that bumped into it. They had the tech, just didn’t manage to convinve miners to accept their transactions.
- qertoip 6y ago
  You are correct about "standard valid" vs "non-standard valid" distinction in Bitcoin. You are incorrect about what constitutes a standard. The "smart contracts" by their own are standard - the whole Lightning Network is based on smart contracts - as well as many other protocols running live for years. It sounds more like your specific transactions were non-standard due to excessive size, usage of non-standard opcodes, or other technical quirks.
  - kolinko 6y ago
    Nope, before Bitcoin core 0.9.2 any script besides 3-4 default templates was considered non-standard. Regular opcodes, any size. We had a basic script that verified 3 out of 4 multisig, and that was non-standard, because the only standard multisig was 2 out of 3. But this was 2014, so it may have been before your time.

kim0 6y ago

If you're interested in a fungible currency, checkout Monero. A true grassroots cypherpunk project.

stevespang 6y ago
Is it true that miners of Monero cannot censor it ?
- RandomBacon 6y ago
  Monero miners cannot see the sender address, the receiver address, or the transaction amount. I don't know if they finished Dandelion which is supposed to remove the link between the transaction and the IP submitting it. As far as I know, without Dandelion, it can be censored by IP address if the people running the miners are paying attention to that part of the network, otherwise Monero cannot be censored like Bitcoin can be.
  - ajkdhcb2 6y ago
    Dandelion is running now
- Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
  When no transaction information is given, all transactions are indistinguishable. Isn't privacy beautiful?
- qertoip 6y ago
  Correct. There is no meaningful basis for censorship in a Monero transaction. The sender, amount, receiver and IP address are all essentially hidden or unavailable. Miner can still decide to censor all transactions, random transactions, transactions over certain KB size, etc - but that is probably not very useful, except maybe to attack the network as a whole.
nosuchthing 6y ago
Grassroots? Do you even know the history of Monero? Unfortunately Monero was intentionally designed to dump the money supply, so the vast majority of XRM was "mined" by a small group of traditional speculative capitalists. Monero just amplifies the current plutocracy of the money system due to the algorithm of the emission curve and mining system. It would be nice if there wasn't a crypto project that didn't try to scam people. https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/242/how-was-the-monero-emission-curve-chosen https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/242/how-was-the-m... https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/858/monero-origins-optimized-crippled-miner https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/858/monero-origin...

ArchD 6y ago

Please elaborate on this nonsensical-sounding statement that perhaps is just easy to misunderstand. 'Miners' is not one person or organization with special authority, so what do you even mean by censorship? Anyone can be a miner and the decision of what gets included in the next block is determined by a competition of hashing (computing) power.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Obi_Juan_Kenobi 6y ago
There is something of a precedent for this when Luke Jr. tried to blacklist addresses he found morally objectionable. https://bitcoinexchangeguide.com/bitcoin-gentoo-client-takeover-attempt-by-btc-developer-luke-jr-again/ https://bitcoinexchangeguide.com/bitcoin-gentoo-client-takeo... Obviously this is a developer issue, not a miner issue. It really does not make sense that a miner would attempt to blacklist any addresses, as they could only delay transactions proportional to their hash power.
kristianp 6y ago
Miners can choose which transactions go into their blocks. If enough of them agree to a certain action, chances are one of them will be the successful miner of the block.
- ArchD 6y ago
  And what's the mechanism for them to want to collude?
  - RandomBacon 6y ago
    Threat of violence by governments?
  - kristianp 6y ago
    Social norms, e.g. they might decide to refund someone who accidentally paid a huge fee for a transaction.

nfin 6y ago

it is not uncensorable in an absolute term, that is true. But can come quite close. Why? For mainly two reasons: 1) Main one: Miners can censor. But miners are not elected. As more transactions are censored by a mojority of miners, the sum of transaction fees of these transactions add up and become a honeypot/incentive. A sum which a "brave" miner could additionally include in a block they would mine (that other miners censoring won't), making themselves MORE profitable by including those. And mining being a low margin business, this is relevant. And this gets more and more relevant the more fees people are ready to pay for such transactions. Nothing is really free in life. It would cost, but the more you are ready to pay a fee, the more uncensorable it gets (if you are not the only one, which is not likely in a long term view in a world with so many countries, minorities, use cases,... ). The condition for this to work, is a) being able to mine anonymously (or one day you'll get arrested) and b) a protocol favoring decentralization (meaning you can have temporarily more centralization like these days, but as long as these more centr. miners behave well and follow the rules, it isn't an issue, and when they start behaving bad, things can get better again [1]). That is why privacy + decentralization-focused bitcoin-software development is so important 2) The second reason is technically correct, but a bit far fetched I have to admit (!), but read to the end: - You can become a miner. Ok, you would need to buy an ASIC or better a few, but with that you finally might get lucky and mine your block with those transactions. - But then again communities could get together and mine together. Like a small town (somewhere hypothetically where some plant grows and producing healthy drugs that are forbidden by law but helping some people who want to pay for that) and thus getting connected to a world wide financial infrastructure to participate in world wide commerce. Or countless other communities are imaginable. It just needs imagination, human creativity and time to develop those scenarios. [1] Example where it has already happened: - Bitcoin had moments where one miner got or got near 51% POW, and miners did switch mininig-pools to stop that. - possibly segwit2x (not entirely sure). Although Segwit2x was circumvented by a user activated softfork, an agreement of a big part of miners wanted to change the rules, but couldn't pull it of edit 1: formatting edit 2: some clarifications

zxcmx 6y ago
Also in practical terms how exactly would you censor "sci-hub" if you wanted to? They could generate a new address for each transaction and amounts could vary.

wslh 6y ago

Show me one censored transaction please. Miners should collude to censor transactions and there are hundreds of thousands of miners.

Thorentis 6y ago
OP said "not uncensorable" meaning it is possible to censor using Bitcoin. This in itself is a problem. Just because it hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean it can't. Tor was a DoD project, and so I automatically assume that it is possible for them to control enough exit nodes for them to control traffic. Even if it doesn't happen in practice, it is actually possible for anybody to do. Same with Bitcoin. Got a big enough budget, you can start censoring transactions. Bitcoin is not anonymous, Bitcoin is not private, Bitcoin is not censorship resistant.
- wslh 6y ago
  I never said it was unsensorable. Try other arguments. The uncensorable is a spectrum so it is censorship resistant under certain premises. No technology is uncensorable with enough resources but Bitcoin is more uncensorable that the global banking system.
  - Thorentis 6y ago
    If you set the bar low enough, anything is more uncensorable.
- sekai 6y ago
  Been doing just fine for 10 years.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

max_ 6y ago

The game theory would not permit this since the miners are rotated every 10 minutes.