In this article you will learn:
- How much power the mining pools Foundry USA and AntPool have
- Why centralization occurs in Bitcoin
- How decentralization can be measured
- Why Bitcoin is more decentralized than Ethereum and Co
Monkey pictures, memecoin mania and ordinal inscriptions: all sorts of shenanigans have found their home on Bitcoin lately. Because: Bitcoin is censorship-resistant, no one is excluded, everything is allowed. One would think so.
But: Miners have already censored transactions – from Bitcoin addresses that were sanctioned by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). An example:
According to Bitcoin developer 0xB10C, mining pool F2Pool failed to validate four transactions from OFAC-sanctioned addresses. Apparently these transactions were filtered out intentionally. F2Pool co-founder Chun Wang then defended himself his position: “Why are you surprised when I refuse to confirm transactions for criminals, dictators and terrorists? I have every right not to confirm transactions by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, don’t I?”
Preventing transactions suspected of being related to terrorist financing certainly helps. But what if transactions of simple users are suddenly censored and decentralization decreases? What role does the influence of large miners play in this?
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