The hosts of “The Van Werdenum Sjorsnado” discussed Mara Pool, Bitcoin mining pools censoring blocks, and what Bitcoiners could do about it.
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In this episode of “The Van Werdenum Sjorsnado”, presenters Aaron van Werdenum and Sjors Provoost discussed the creation of Mara Pool, the American Bitcoin mining pool operated by Marathon Digital Holdings, which claims to be fully compliant with US regulations. In general, van Werdenum and Provoost discussed the prospect of mining censorship, what this would mean for Bitcoin and what can be done about it.
Mara Pool claims to be fully compliant with U.S. regulations, which means that it applies anti-money laundering (AML) controls and adheres to the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) sanctions list. Although details were not explicitly given, it presumably means that this pool does not have any transactions in its blocks if those transactions send coins to or from Bitcoin addresses that are on an OFAC blacklist.
Van Werdenum and Provoost discussed what it means for a mining pool to now censor certain transactions, and they further expanded on what it might look like if this practice were more widespread. They pondered what censoring mining pools could do if they could ever get close to much of the hash power, and what Bitcoin users could possibly do (if anything) in such a scenario.
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