Author: Staf Verhaegen 2017-02-11 15:26:33
Published on: 2017-02-11T15:26:33+00:00
The vulnerability of centralized nodes to follow anti-money laundering/ know your customer (AML/KYC) rules has been highlighted by Peter Todd via bitcoin-dev. Tom Harding questioned this, asking why mining pools haven't already been required to implement AML/KYC. Eric Voskuil confirmed that the vulnerability exists and is trivial to exploit, but economic incentives are not yet great enough. However, analogous attacks on other centralization points are already underway. Some data centers only provide hardware, power and internet access, without inspecting internet traffic. Countries like Iceland have specific laws to prevent government control over data and network traffic in data centers. In contrast, domestic ISP services often prioritize traffic and use deep packet inspection (DPI) capabilities, making them easier to force by governments to filter certain traffic. The author hosts their Bitcoin node in a German data center, which they believe is more censorship-resistant than a node going through any American ISP.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T21:18:36.181331+00:00