It should be noted that Marathon is mining “compliant” blocks of its own volition and that nothing in the current U.S. regulatory or legal code explicitly mandates that practice for miners. >
They are only mining blocks
That are compliant, meaning that contain no transactions from known bad actors.
They are just costing their business revenue that another miner will gladly scoop up.
Just because your transaction is in the mempool it doesn’t mean a miner has to pick it up and confirm it. And if it isn’t picked up for a long time it can get canceled and returned to you from the mempool
Simple as that, they choose transactions from mempool, and then build a valid block. There is no globally broadcasted "valid template", to build canonical blocks, empty blocks are literally just as valid as full 2MB blocks, assuming proper hash was made.
They don't just throw their hands up and say "Welp, I just don't wanna mine anything because the mempool is full of baaaaad transactions." That premise you put forth is pants-on-head levels of retarded.
Just because they won’t mine blocks with those transactions, doesn’t mean nobody else can.
They are simply only hurting their revenue.
Which is why they stopped doing it.
What you are worried about, would be more feasible in the early days of bitcoin where there wasn’t millions of individual miners not associated to any pool.
Again, your willful misinterpreting does not negate the fact that miners can, and do, ignore transactions that are not in their best interest. Quite simply, if that best interest is ignoring certain transactions from choice addresses, it only needs 51% of the hashing power to actually keep you off the blockchain. At current times, if Antpool and Foundry USA felt the need to keep you from using Bitcoin, they can.
51% attacks are not hypothetical, and can easily achieve this goal. It does not hurt their revenue, because again, there is no canonical chain asides from the longest chain, which can just as easily exist without your transaction.
Additionally, 51% attacks are easier now than ever, with the proliferation of ASIC farms, it is easier than ever for a well funded state actor IE USA, China, etc to subsume mining companies and execute a 51% attack. This is not a new concern, nor is it a small one.
They are only mining blocks That are compliant, meaning that contain no transactions from known bad actors.
They are just costing their business revenue that another miner will gladly scoop up.
Which is why they stopped:
https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/05/31/bitcoin-miner-marathon-will-no-longer-censor-transactions-ceo-says/
Coinbureau
Simple as that, they choose transactions from mempool, and then build a valid block. There is no globally broadcasted "valid template", to build canonical blocks, empty blocks are literally just as valid as full 2MB blocks, assuming proper hash was made.
They don't just throw their hands up and say "Welp, I just don't wanna mine anything because the mempool is full of baaaaad transactions." That premise you put forth is pants-on-head levels of retarded.
They cannot remove addresses from the mempool.
This proves my exact point.
Just because they won’t mine blocks with those transactions, doesn’t mean nobody else can.
They are simply only hurting their revenue.
Which is why they stopped doing it.
What you are worried about, would be more feasible in the early days of bitcoin where there wasn’t millions of individual miners not associated to any pool.
Again, your willful misinterpreting does not negate the fact that miners can, and do, ignore transactions that are not in their best interest. Quite simply, if that best interest is ignoring certain transactions from choice addresses, it only needs 51% of the hashing power to actually keep you off the blockchain. At current times, if Antpool and Foundry USA felt the need to keep you from using Bitcoin, they can.
51% attacks are not hypothetical, and can easily achieve this goal. It does not hurt their revenue, because again, there is no canonical chain asides from the longest chain, which can just as easily exist without your transaction.
Additionally, 51% attacks are easier now than ever, with the proliferation of ASIC farms, it is easier than ever for a well funded state actor IE USA, China, etc to subsume mining companies and execute a 51% attack. This is not a new concern, nor is it a small one.
That’s not true about 51%, it would just mean I may need to wait twice as long for my transaction to go through.
They would need 100% of the hashpower, which is impossible to achieve due to at home private miners, and other large pools.