These are sanctioned addresses that custodial services are supposed to block. This doesn’t block the addresses or wallets from going into the next bitcoin block. Although that is within the realm of possibilities, I haven’t seen it happen yet. I already mentioned that this can happen before. You should read the entire thread. The government could subsidize mining and take over riot, marathon, and the other big mining businesses then filter out those sanctioned addresses from blocks. However, I also said that the fee market is what determines censorship resistance in money. This is all speculation but if the government announced it was going to subsidize mining, that would legitimize bitcoin to the world. The price would pump and other governments would jump in to mine as well. This inevitably would weaken the dollar which is not what the government would want to do. Other countries like Russia and Iran would rush to gain hash power to prevent the US from sanctioning them. More countries would encourage mining businesses to operate in order to profit and a lot would welcome miners from the US. And as the price of bitcoin goes up, the demand for dollars declines. The government would need to print more money to keep subsidizing and censoring blocks which would drive more people away from dollars and into Bitcoin. They’re shooting themselves in the foot and destroying their currency. In order to be censorship resistant, the censored transactions would have to bid higher fees to incentivize mining those transactions. As those fees get higher, rogue miners go online. This is similar to how “illegal” drug dealers pop up when it becomes profitable to do so. I think this type of government attack will fail. But it remains to be seen.

GitHub

Censorship Resistance Property

Bitcoin Cross-Platform C++ Development Toolkit. Contribute to libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system development by creating an account on GitHub.