Author: Peter Todd 2013-03-07 11:00:18
Published on: 2013-03-07T11:00:18+00:00
The use of UTXO merkle-sum-fee-trees and fraud notices can effectively audit the blocks produced by miners and enable SPV nodes to reject invalid blocks without requiring the entire blockchain data. However, preventing censorship is still a challenge, as it is fundamentally miners who choose what transactions to accept into blocks. The need for auditable off-chain transaction systems is vulnerable, as all trustworthy ones require at least some on-chain transactions to be publicly known, making censorship a possibility. Additionally, transaction volumes make running a validating node more expensive, leading to decreased independent pools and easier monitoring of those remaining. However, with small blocks, barriers to entry to become a miner remain low, and mining anonymously behind low-bandwidth anti-censorship technologies such as Tor remains feasible. Any attempt by a major pool to censor a transaction will lead to an opportunity for an anonymous miner to profit from mining that transaction, providing incentives to treat transactions fairly equally on a fee per KB basis. The ever-present possibility of this happening further discourages large miners from censorship in the first place. While off-chain transaction systems can still practice censorship on their own, the decentralized blockchain's existence allows communities subject to such censorship to create their own auditable and secure off-chain transaction systems for their own use. Overall, the ability to transfer value freely is maintained through economic incentives to find ways to move value between all off-chain transaction systems regardless of imposed restrictions.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T10:25:01.402343+00:00