In a recent Twitter thread, a developer questioned the whole idea of Bitcoin censorship resistance.
Bitcoin censorship resistance
Bitcoin was based on the idea of offering complete censorship resistance for transactions. However, according to a Bitcoin developer, this currency is far from censorship resistant.
Developer Luke Dashjr posted a Twitter thread that raised questions about Bitcoin’s censorship resistance, saying that the “hypothetical network censorship resistance is not based on the mere hope that miners won’t censor.”
While making his case, Luke highlighted his problem with the Bitcoin network, noting that miners can do whatever they want. For example, he said, they (the miners) cannot be expected to mine the assets or complete the validations of the transactions that they do not want. Instead, miners can choose what to work on or not. According to the developer, decentralization occurs when another miner can choose to work on what one has rejected.
The developer highlighted that a party interested in a transaction could exploit it themselves in the worst case. He added that this can change and that a transaction could not be extracted in case of a spam attack.
Luke pointed out that Bitcoin is only censorship resistant when miners choose to mine a transaction. If all the miners ignore the transaction, then it can be censored.
Questions about mining decentralization
However, while noting that censorship resistance is based on decentralization of mining, he still questioned the latter over BTC. This developer pointed out that the assumption that bitcoin mining is completely decentralized fell long ago.
In recent years, the decentralization of Bitcoin mining processes has been questioned. There have been questions about miner concentrations. Based on report via the New York Times in June 2022, early Bitcoin mining was highly concentrated, with only about 64 key players, including the founders who mined most of the early BTC.
Over the years, the concentration has dropped, but is still predominantly high, according to reports. For example, recent statistics indicate that only two large groups control 50% BTC hash rate.
According to the developer mentioned above, the concentration of Bitcoin mining made the network lose its aspect of resistance to censorship. Luke also pointed out that pretending there is resistance to miner censorship by allowing spam attacks won’t fix the problem.
