Difficult but in theory possible. You might have some rogue pools with a different block template but those would be treated same as "unlicensed money transmitters".
Discussion
To add... they could even add a consensus rule to discard such blocks from the chain effectively burning "illegal bitcoins"
Is this not essentially the same thing?
It has happened before and could happen again.
"Marathon Digital Holdings’ (MARA) new mining pool has mined a bitcoin block that is “fully compliant with U.S. regulations,” meaning the company has started excluding transactions from entities it believes are sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Treasury or have been involved in dark web activity.
The Marathon OFAC pool...“refrains from processing transactions from those listed on the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (SDN)” to stay “compliant with U.S. regulatory standards,” according to the company.
...
“By excluding transactions between nefarious actors, we can provide investors and regulators with the peace of mind that the bitcoin we produce is ‘clean’, ethical and compliant with regulatory standards,” Marathon said in a statement.
"
Did not know this... I guess the next step would be to rebrand bitcoin as UnitedStatesDigitalCurrencyCoin. A lot of shit starts to make sense now in BTC land. Fucking governments!
This is why decentralisation in mining is so important.
Hopefully improvements are made such as those Ocean Pool is working on to allow miners to choose their own block templates rather than just blindly handing their compute over to the mega pools.
Ocean is incorporated in Wyoming. Others will be incorporated elsewhere, somehow. US aligned countries will follow US rules in regards to btc mining. US antagonist countries will follow whatever they please but then:
I am really afraid of this shit. I see it as the only real existential risk to BTC.
Also, this will not be solved with bitaxes or nerdminers... Not sure what the solution will be, if any.
It's not that far off if bitmain teams up with some other large entity and then they have a majority of the hash. 🤷♂️