The problem of transaction censorship in Bitcoin mining pools is important because there is a large imbalance between the cost of censorship and the cost of avoiding censorship.

For example, if transactions to a certain address (address A) are censored by some mining pools, the owner of this address will have to spend additional time and money to bypass the censorship. A transaction that would have been processed in 10 minutes without censorship might take 20 minutes, or they might have to find a mining pool that doesn't censor and pay extra.

If the owner of address A made a costly transaction and moved the balance to another address (address B), the censor could simply add address B to the censor list to continue the censorship. However, if the owner wishes to transact again, they will have to spend the same amount of money they spent to make the transaction at address A again.

In such a situation, can a user who is being censored by a mining pool be considered a legitimate user of Bitcoin? Can the Bitcoin network be considered neutral? Why should the owners of addresses A and B incur additional costs? Is the Bitcoin network providing a rationale to justify this situation?

There is one cheapest way for the owners of addresses A and B to use Bitcoin normally. It's to give in to the censors. But is this the path Bitcoin wants to take?

Therefore, I believe that censorship of transactions by mining pools undermines Bitcoin's censorship resistance and neutrality. The question of spam filtering versus censorship is not really important here. What matters is that if you can filter spam, you can also censor transactions.

#Bitcoin