On Tue, Jun 03, 2025 at 05:00:42PM +0000, Greg Maxwell wrote: > But when the censorship is backed by threat (even if vague or > unconstitutional) of civil or criminal legal penalties, the avenue to just > bypass may be much less available. > > So for example, in an alternative universe: Bitcoin goes along with Guida > and after having built this massive edifice of transaction censorship the > Bitcoin developers lose their UK lawsuit Craig S Wright after he > successfully bribes a judge, and now have a the UK courts imposing a > worldwide order to freeze any of their bitcoin address under threat of > imprisonment. The censorship is deployed via the prebuilt censorship > infrastructure, and willingness to bypass it is greatly decreased because > doing so would land the bypasser a UK arrest warrant. Could they still get > their transactions through? Probably but at much greater costs and delays, > creating a significant harm. Not building the censorship infrastructure > (even though you intend it for 'good' purposes) and instead building > anti-censorship infrastructure leaves us all with a better world.
I want to emphasize that this type of threat is not theoretical. Court-Confirmed Fraudster Craig Wright did in fact sue us in an effort to recover alleged stolen coins. If courts perceive a history of Bitcoin Core developers actively trying to prevent "undesirable" transactions, then there is a very real chance for courts to order Bitcoin Core developers to do things like freeze addresses, even though if anyone posted such a pull request it would be ineffectual because people wouldn't choose to run it. Still the order would be highly disruptive to people and the project. The community should want every protection available to prevent future court actions like that from being considered, issued or succeeding. A history of actively trying to prevent "undesirable" transactions does not help. It's notable that this advocacy from filtering is coming from a pool that claims to offer decentralized mining via the DATUM protocol. Yet hasn't even taken the most basic step to actually achieving that: releasing the full DATUM source code. If a court orders miners to run an extension of Knots with specific addresses censored, DATUM will do absolutely nothing to stop that: DATUM currently has OCEAN approving blocks - allowing OCEAN to reject shares mining censored addresses. Without the ability to spin up competitors to OCEAN, miners wishing to contribute uncensored hash power can do nothing other than hope someone decided to rewrite, from scratch, all the closed-source OCEAN code making DATAUM actually work. If you're actually serious about decentralization, open-source OCEAN. -- https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Bitcoin Development Mailing List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bitcoindev/aEGKu4u8B03Tiy26%40petertodd.org.
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