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Ok, quick thread here.
1/n
There are 2 different issues in Bitcoin: privacy & censorship-resistance (connected but not the same). The former is about attackers not being able to cheaply spy on you. The latter about attackers not being able to prevent you from spending sats.
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1/n
There are 2 different issues in Bitcoin: privacy & censorship-resistance (connected but not the same). The former is about attackers not being able to cheaply spy on you. The latter about attackers not being able to prevent you from spending sats.
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2/n
The connection is due to the fact that intelligence about you can be used to hurt you in retaliation for your transactions (including the one to your future self: saving/hodling). This threat is just a fear-based kind of censorship. But let's just consider the latter.
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2/n
The connection is due to the fact that intelligence about you can be used to hurt you in retaliation for your transactions (including the one to your future self: saving/hodling). This threat is just a fear-based kind of censorship. But let's just consider the latter.
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3/n
Since day 1 of Bitcoin, there was only the problem of discretionality of tx inclusion: miners can chose to generate "empty" (ie coinbase-only) blocks, preventing people from transacting onchain (and thus also creating friction for settlement of offchain transactions).
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3/n
Since day 1 of Bitcoin, there was only the problem of discretionality of tx inclusion: miners can chose to generate "empty" (ie coinbase-only) blocks, preventing people from transacting onchain (and thus also creating friction for settlement of offchain transactions).
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4/n
This in general could *not* be solved by any kind of privacy improvement: even if txs where obfuscated (ring signatures, confidential txs, zkSNARK shielded-txs, signature-aggregated CoinJoins, etc.), thus preventing tx-blackisting, tx-whitelisting is alwsys possible.
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4/n
This in general could *not* be solved by any kind of privacy improvement: even if txs where obfuscated (ring signatures, confidential txs, zkSNARK shielded-txs, signature-aggregated CoinJoins, etc.), thus preventing tx-blackisting, tx-whitelisting is alwsys possible.
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5/n
This means that even if you introduce privacy features, censoring miners can just opt to exclude any tx which is not explicitly approved, either by excluding the txs enabling the features (which is *all of them* if they aren't opt-in: empty blocks again), or worse:
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5/n
This means that even if you introduce privacy features, censoring miners can just opt to exclude any tx which is not explicitly approved, either by excluding the txs enabling the features (which is *all of them* if they aren't opt-in: empty blocks again), or worse:
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