I’m sorry, I’m seeing OFAC a lot on NOSTR this evening. Can you please explain it to me what’s going on and why it matters? As is common nowadays Google didn’t give me a straight answer.
Discussion
It appears that at least one miner pool has censored a bitcoin transaction from a address on the OFAC list. (The government naughty list)
More than likely the transaction will just hang out in the mempool until a block is confirmed by another pool that isn’t censoring.
It matters because if this spreads and more mining pools start to censor then the freedom to transact is not guaranteed. The network will be captured. You will only be allowed to send bitcoin to addresses that the government says you can. If you have tainted sats in your wallet suddenly you are no longer able to move any of your coins.
They don’t have to break your 12 seed words, they only need to stop your transactions from being confirmed on the blockchain.
We cannot stop pools from censoring but we can choose to only use mining pools that don’t thus robbing censoring pools of hash power and letting market forces control their behavior.
#OFACHashloss
I’m totally ignorant here. If one pool doesn’t validate a transaction but 51% of the network does… doesn’t that invalidate the pool’s transactions for that block? Is bitcoin validation transaction by transaction or block by block? Or hash by hash? I understand bitcoin’s economic functions well but the programmatic mechanism still escapes me.
A block is solved roughly every 10 minutes by a single miner or a pool of miners. The transactions in the mempool are confirmed when this happens, as many that can before the block memory space is full. Ones that didn’t make it stay in the mempool for another 10 minutes until another block is solved by a different miner for another chance of getting confirmed. Usually how much you pay in fees determines how fast you can get confirmed.
That’s probably the best explanation I’ve received! So miners receive the transaction fees from the mempool included in the block it solves? That’s a secondary way miners earn bitcoin on top of the block subsidy? And some mining pools are refusing to include OFAC wallet addresses in their mempool when solving blocks?
Yes. The miner that solves the block receives the block reward and any fees for the transactions that were confirmed. Miners Tetris in as much as they can to maximize their profits. Below is a visual representation of that.
At least one miner pool has done so that has been observed. Possibly more than we know. I am hoping to raise awareness about this issue and advocate for miners not to join pools that censor.
