The Marathon OFAC pool, which was first announced in late March, “refrains from processing transactions from those listed on the U.S.
Marathon said it is addressing a concern among “many large funds and corporations” that have” expressed interest in purchasing bitcoin” by marketing its mined bitcoin as OFAC-compliant.
Department of the Treasury and Office of Foreign Assets Control, databases of OFAC restricted cryptocurrency addresses, as well as other sources including the dark web,” he said.
The practice of censoring transactions, sanctioned or otherwise , is a subject of heated debate within the Bitcoin community.
He also said Marathon’s approach doesn’t make sense.
Further, shortly after Marathon blazoned the “clean” block on social media, bitcoiners from Iran and around the world began to send bitcoin to the address that received the Marathon “clean” block reward.
Miners speaking to CoinDesk from other pools declined to go on the record about Marathon and its compliance push, but the sentiment was generally negative.
Marathon began directing its hashrate, or computer processing power, to the OFAC pool on May 1 and mined its first block on May 5, Bitcoin block 682170.
Interestingly, it also included many transactions that BitMEX’s model excluded because their fees were too low to be considered a priority.
If Marathon is not receiving out-of-band fees, then so far its “compliant” blocks are netting significantly less in transaction fees.
Marathon’s block occurred only a minute after the one before, which could explain the block’s lower fee reward and transaction count.
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