BTC and Censorship (Filtering?) At Mining Level

... top two mining pools, Foundry USA and AntPool

higher operating costs and outdated setups will go offline. This will further centralize hash rate, with large-scale mining pools operating with significantly lower marginal cost per hash rate — thus intensifying centralization concerns.

The top two mining pools, AntPool and Foundry USA, are both regulatory compliant and require all miners to fulfill Know Your Customer obligations — ostensibly placing control in the hands of U.S. regulators.

The argument of whether Bitcoin centralization will lead to censorship may be a moot point.

In November 2023, Bitcoin developer 0xB10C reported on a number of transactions that may have been filtered out of blocks by mining pools. The suspect blocks all contained addresses sanctioned by the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

From six candidate blocks, 0xB10C identified four blocks believed to omit OFAC-sanctioned addresses.

All four transactions were ignored by the F2Pool mining block. 0xB10C ultimately said, “These four missing sanctioned transactions lead to the conclusion that F2Pool is currently filtering transactions.”

That opinion was vindicated in short order as F2Pool confirmed that it had filtered transactions. Following community pushback, it then announced it would reverse the decision “for now.”

It’s worth remembering that even if one mining pool filters out a transaction, that does not stop the transaction from being processed, but it does potentially result in that transaction taking longer to process. 

The more mining pools that filter it, the longer the potential delay. 

There are many ifs and buts when dealing with the issue of hashing power centralization

Bitcoin maximalists’ reluctance to protocol changes.

a few additional bumps in the road for miners, the only realistic choice will be to ride it out.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-halving-btc-mining-centralization

https://mempool.space/