Mining pool censorship of non-state sanctioned transactions

General
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Government friendly (licensed?) mining pools that censor blacklisted transactions is here (see VICE tweet below). This is going to be a huge problem for transparent blockchains and for any who value censorship resistance and decentralization.

While mostly positive for Zcash, this is a double-edged sword of sorts. It’s good for Zcash because privacy on the base layer is really the only thing that defends against this type of “state attack” (make no mistake, this is an attack). Yet it’s bad because if this becomes the norm going forward, we should expect an increasingly hostile stance from “Big Gov” towards privacy coins – as privacy coins would undermine Big Gov efforts to censor transactions.

The stage is being set for arguably one of the greatest fights for freedom and decentralization that Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies may ever face. So we should probably start talking about it, because there are many implications for Zcash.

VICE tweet w/ article:

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Great breakdown thread here:

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This seems like a pretty rudimentary aspect to the mission as it pertains to Zcash.

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Zcash needs to be ready when that happens a lot on Bitcoin. Zcash is being viewed as censorship resistant private money, we need to keep it that way. Money beats all other use-cases.

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One potential implication for Zcash is the existence of t-addr. As long as t-addr is enabled on Zcash, mining pools may face similar regulatory pressure (i.e. to censor any transaction that isn’t a t-addr). This is all highly speculative right now, but something to consider.

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