Bitcoin Mining Pool F2Pool Accused of Censoring Transactions on U.S. Government Blacklist

F2Pool, the third-biggest Bitcoin mining pool, drew ire on social media after a report that it may be censoring transactions from an handle topic to U.S. authorities sanctions.

One of many F2Pool mission’s leaders subsequently appeared to verify the report, stirring up controversy since “censorship resistance” is taken into account by many Bitcoiners to be a cardinal precept of the biggest and authentic blockchain. On the identical time, many authorities officers world wide have expressed concern that blockchain networks can be utilized to finance legal exercise and terrorism.

The Bitcoin development-focused blogger 0xB10C wrote Nov. 20 that his “miningpool-observer” mission “detected six lacking transactions spending from OFAC-sanctioned addresses.” OFAC stands for the Office of Foreign Assets Control, a lead company in U.S. authorities efforts to implement financial sanctions.

Just a few of the cases “are probably false-positives and never the results of filtering,” the blogger wrote.

“The transactions lacking from F2Pool’s blocks are, nonetheless, probably filtered,” in accordance with the piece, which was cross-posted to the web site Stacker News.

A Bitcoin mining pool is the place operators working to verify transactions on the community be part of collectively to coordinate their efforts after which share any ensuing rewards – sometimes with the purpose of offering a steadier revenue stream.

As a result of they find yourself controlling large chunks of the community’s processing, or “hashpower,” their choices can have broad ramifications. And members in a mining pool can, comparatively simply, swap to a unique pool.

F2Pool is chargeable for about 14% of mined Bitcoin blocks over the previous 12 months, the third-most after Foundry USA’s 30% and AntPool’s 22%, based mostly on information from Blockchain.com.

F2Pool co-founder Chun Wang subsequently posted on X (previously Twitter), “Why do you are feeling shocked once I refuse to verify transactions for these criminals, dictators and terrorists? I’ve each proper to not verify any transactions from Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, don’t I?” The publish has since been deleted.

Chun later wrote that “a censorship-resistant system have to be designed to withstand censorship on the protocol stage, reasonably than counting on every participant to behave rigorously and chorus from censorship.”

“The Web and TCP/IP have failed this,” he added. “Bitcoin ought to be taught from the failure.”

A pair hours after that, Chun tweeted once more, “Will disable the tx filtering patch for now, till the group reaches a extra complete consensus on this matter.” The time period “tx” is commonly used as shorthand for “transaction.”

Based mostly on the replies on X, the group response was fairly unfavourable.

“The group has been in consensus on this for a really very long time. You do not do it,” one poster wrote.

“Count on blowback,” a poster wrote.

One other jab displayed the mission’s title prominently subsequent to the U.S. Treasury Division’s seal: