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24 sats \ 4 replies \ @sommerfeld 27 Sep 2022 \ parent \ on: Is Mining Censorship A Serious Threat To Bitcoin? bitcoin
Censorship could be subsidized by a state level adversary. They have virtually infinite funds and can always print more.
The game theory / economic incentives to not censor transactions are a good baseline safeguard but the issue is still a legitimate concern and ignoring/downplaying it won't make it go away.
Censorship could be subsidized by a state level adversary. They have virtually infinite funds and can always print more.
Yes, was waiting for this response.
the issue is still a legitimate concern and ignoring/downplaying it won't make it go away.
I agree.
Regarding state level adversaries censoring:
Wouldn't they debase their currency in the process? Also, it would be obvious if they tried to gain 51% of the hash rate since they would have to buy a lot of ASICs.
Only afterwards, they could try to censor by establishing a bigger chain on which other miners will mine. However, even in this case, 49% (or the percentage of remaining "honest" miners) would still include "censored" transactions.
And if this gets out of hand, to my understanding, the nodes operators could do a UASF to mark another "honest" block as part of the valid chain (a checkpoint essentially).
However, the state level actor could then attack this chain again and this social consensus would take some time during which it would be risky to use the network for transactions since they could be reversed if a different chain is selected.
So we would be back at square one.
So yes, I agree. There are still some valid concerns regarding censorship.
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Attempting to directly perform a 51% attack is unrealistic even for a state level adversary.
The most likely scenario is for them to bribe pool operators / big miners to censor certain transactions or just in general disrupt the network.
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How would censorship look like in bitcoin? Your transaction will just never get a confirmation? sooner or later it will tho?
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Delaying the confirmation of an important transaction can be very disruptive.
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