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Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2025 12:16:59 +0000
From: Peter Todd <pete@petertodd.org>
To: Greg Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com>
Cc: Sjors Provoost <sjors@sprovoost.nl>, bitcoindev@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [bitcoindev] Censorship Resistant Transaction Relay - Taking out
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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

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