In a current Twitter thread, a developer questioned the whole concept of Bitcoin’s censorship resistance.
Bitcoin’s censorship-resistance
Bitcoin was constructed on the concept of providing full censorship resistance for transactions. Nevertheless, based on a Bitcoin developer, this coin is way from censorship-resistant.
The developer Luke Dashjr posted a Twitter thread elevating doubts about Bitcoin’s censorship resistance, saying the community’s ” hypothetical censorship-resistance will not be primarily based on some mere hope miners received’t censor.”
As he laid down his case, Luke highlighted his drawback with the Bitcoin community noting that miners can do no matter they need. As an illustration, he mentioned, they (miners) can’t be anticipated to mine the property or full validations of transactions they don’t wish to. As an alternative, miners can select what to or not work on. Based mostly on the developer, decentralization is available in the place one other miner can select to work on what one has turned down.
The developer highlighted {that a} celebration considering a transaction may mine it for themselves within the worst-case state of affairs. He added that this could change and a transaction did not be mined within the occasion of a spam assault.
Luke famous that Bitcoin is simply censorship resistant when the miners select to mine a transaction. If all miners ignore the transaction, then it may be censored.
Questions on mining decentralization
Nevertheless, whereas noting that censorship resistance depends on mining decentralization, he nonetheless questioned the latter on BTC. This developer identified that the belief that bitcoin mining is totally decentralized fell way back.
Up to now few years, the decentralization of Bitcoin mining processes has fallen into doubt. There have been questions on miner concentrations. Based mostly on a report by way of New York Occasions in June 2022, early Bitcoin mining was extremely concentrated, with solely about 64 key gamers, together with founders mining most early BTC.
Through the years, the focus has lowered however remains to be predominantly excessive, based on experiences. As an illustration, current statistics point out that solely two massive swimming pools management 50% of the BTC hash charge.
Based mostly on the developer talked about earlier, the focus of Bitcoin mining made the community lose its side of censorship resistance. Luke additionally famous that pretending there may be miner censorship resistance by permitting spam assaults won’t repair the issue.