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A New Bitcoin Mining Pool Claims It Has Tools to Censor Blockchain Transactions

source-logo  news.bitcoin.com 13 November 2020 17:30, UTC

A New Bitcoin Mining Pool Claims It Has Tools to Censor Blockchain Transactions

A blockchain and technology company claims its new bitcoin mining pool is embedded with tools that enable the pool to censure transactions in the blocks they mine. According to a statement issued by the DMG, the parent company to Blockseer mining pool, this ability allows the latter to “exceed” the compliance requirements of the U.S. Government’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

The mining pool’s ability to filter or censor transactions means “high-risk wallets will not be included in Blockseer’s posted blocks.” Detailing the company’s breakthrough, DMG, in a statement, says “all users of Blockseer’s pool are required to pass Know Your Customer (KYC) protocols.” The statement adds:

Blocks posted to the Bitcoin blockchain by Blockseer’s pool will only contain filtered transactions using Blockseer and Walletscore’s labelling data, along with verified sources such as the United States OFAC blacklist for crypto.

Furthermore, DMG claims that Blockseer’s pool “may further decentralize the bitcoin blockchain, readjusting the balance of hash rate to North America, where more Bitcoin nodes operate.”

However, others see Blockseer’s new mining pool, which is the culmination of a two-year effort by DMG, as a threat to bitcoin. Bitcoin transactions are censorship-resistant, while its blockchain network is decentralized. Therefore, when centralized entities retain the right to reject certain transactions, this does not bode very for bitcoin’s future.

Others fear that if Blockseer’s new mining pool proves to be successful, most miners will be forced to enable the same transaction filtering in the future. At the time of publication, Blockseer’s pool is not represented among the 15 mining pools pointing hash at the BTC chain.

news.bitcoin.com