New Bitcoin Mining Pool Says It Will Censor BTC Transactions
analysis

New Bitcoin Mining Pool Says It Will Censor BTC Transactions

THELOGICALINDIAN - Blockseer is touting advancing censorship appearance with the rollout of its new Bitcoin mining pool

Blockseer, a U.S.-based accessory of DMG Blockchain Solutions, afresh appear a clandestine beta adaptation of a new Bitcoin mining pool. This accurate mining pool comes with a different feature, however.

Blacklisting Bitcoin Blocks

The Blockseer Mining Pool will abridge affairs from blacklisted wallets and authorization miners to abide KYC, according to business materials.

New blocks generated by the Blockseer basin will alone accommodate filtered transactions. The filters will be based on the abstracts provided by Walletscore,  the company’s own blockchain argumentative tool, and added sources like blacklisted Bitcoin wallet addresses. 

Regulators such as the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) blacklists bitcoin wallets which they accept affiliated to bent activity. 

OFAC has already blacklisted 20 new Bitcoin addresses endemic by a North Korean hacking accumulation in May 2024, for example. 

Blockseer said the aggregation wants to accede with OFAC and accomplish abiding its mining basin additionally rejects affairs from blacklisted wallets. Sheldon Bennett, COO of DMG, said in a press release

“Blockseer’s basin brings a new compliance-focused accepted to the industry, not alone in the abstracts the basin provides to its users, but additionally in the Bitcoin blocks it mines on the network. The basin is focused on actuality bare of transaction from accepted abominable wallets.” 

Regulating Mining: A Slippery Slope

Various crypto commentators accept been beneath than bullish on the news, claiming Blockseer’s account will set the amiss precedent. Riccardo Spagni, the antecedent advance maintainer of Monero, said, “it’s alone a amount of time till best Bitcoin mining pools are affected to do this transaction filtering.”

Other experts agree. According to Juraj Bednar, Co-Founder of Hacktrophy, a bearings area a mining basin decides not to accommodate bedraggled affairs sets a alarming precedent.

“If the government comes in and says you can’t abundance the blocks that absorb these UTXOs, or you’ll lose either a coffer account, barter account, business admittance or go to bastille for money laundering, best of the big miners would comply. Blockseer is aloof a aboriginal example,” Bednar writes in his blog.

Leo Wandersleb, the architect of WalletScrutiny.com, wrote that the bearings could advance to a bendable angle and a new war amid assorted mining pools. 

Even admitting pools accomplish Bitcoin mining added assisting for alone miners, they accept been criticized for actuality very centralized. Because mining pools are centralized, they can be affected to accede with regulations. 

Spagni said that to adverse this trend, Bitcoin developers should apparatus new aloofness features, and miners should accept decentralized Bitcoin mining pools to accumulate the arrangement free.