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You're setting up a straw man, do you realize? There's no such thing as censorship within a decentralized network. Every node does what it wants to do and doesn't by itself have power. The RESULT is very similar, if there are defaults set up in a reference implementation or if enough nodes do this. So the people who maintain that reference implementation have to think about the result of their filters in aggregate. Not simply on that one node that's running the software. You are just running a node, but they have to consider the aggregate. Because it results in censoring these transactions when enough nodes don't propagate them. Back channels are required to get around that emergent censorship of these valid transactions. If the RESULT of these filters, given enough nodes implementing them, is a censoring of them from the mem-pool, other than using a black-market for transactions, then where would we say this censoring is coming from? It's obviously right that it's not censorship for you to do this in your node configuration, but it also is very similar in result to censorship in the end. If the major implementation of our nodes is maintaining a feature that results in censorship, that is similar enough to a government managing policies about what we can do on Bitcoin, for me. I don't like it.