The miner previously famous for announcing they were only going to mine ofac compliant blocks has launched a private txn submission product whose main feature is easily bypassing mempool policy.
Pieter Wuille in an interview with optech said “[Out of band payments and private mempools are] our biggest enemy. Among the top contenders of the biggest threats to Bitcoin in the short to medium term”
If private mempools become more attractive than the p2p mempool built into core, Bitcoin will have a serious centralization problem. Now imagine the company running that private mempool also has a press release out that they only mine ofac compliant blocks. See where this is going?
So much of this conversation has been caught up in jpeg this and censorship that, when in reality this is the real problem.
Literally the ofac block company is standing up the service that could actually seriously harm Bitcoin. Knowingly? I don’t know, and honestly I’m sure the core devs had something to say about it, but I’m surprised the social media hornets nest did not.
Instead of hearing this very compelling message in support of core’s actions, I’ve been reading all this shit about this core dev actually isn’t very smart and mempool policies are censorship Actually.
It is such a missed opportunity to align actual significant efforts to maintain bitcoin’s decentralization and neutrality with the social immune system of the Bitcoin community. I wish I had put it together sooner.
Core is supposed to write good code, but there’s this secret other thing that needs to be done, and that’s making sure people run it. I don’t think it’s entirely the Core devs’ jobs, but I think the bit would have helped a lot. Code is law but it’s nothing if no one runs it.
I feel like no one wanted to stir the pot? But every core dev is adjacent to a professional pot stirrer. What are the influencers good for if not this?
And now, instead of being a little mean to one of the literal worst miners, core has to deal with people questioning whether they’ll even run their code. It’s a shame because I think the threat is real, and the actions are justified. Being a little clearer about the reasons why would do a lot.
