Third-largest Bitcoin mining pool ‘likely’ censored OFAC-sanctioned transactions
One of Bitcoin’s (BTC) core value propositions is it being a censorship-resistance form of money, not subject to arbitrary rule-making. With Bitcoin, anyone who can afford the network fees is supposed to be able to transact permissionlessly. However, a report from pseudonymous 0xB10C , a Bitcoin developer and owner of mining pool-observer , found data that suggests F2Pool has censored OFAC- sanctioned transaction s. F2Pool is the third-largest Bitcoin mining pool, responsible for 13.7% of all mined blocks in the last 12 months, according to the mempool.space ranking. Essentially, one out of every seven BTC blocks could be mined under a censorship regime if F2Pool actively starts to filter sanctioned transactions. It is also important to understand that both Foundry USA and AntPool, the two largest mining pools, require KYC from their miners. The identification process makes it more likely that some sort of compliance could happen in the future. Cryptocurrency Wha...