It was a dangerous game on many levels that the Marathon group, which specializes in American bitcoin mining, was trying to play. Its “more bank than white” bitcoins may have been to the liking of regulators, but not at all to the liking of the cryptosphere. The latter seems to have changed the giant’s mind.
Goodbye censorship and discrimination of BTC transactions?
Marathon Digital Holdings has been heavily criticized by the Bitcoin community in recent times, partly because it did not send a bit signal for the Taproot update when its mining pool validated a block of transactions, but mainly because it discriminated against and censored BTC transactions from addresses it did not like.
To avoid further tarnishing its reputation in the cryptosphere, Marathon’s CEO Fred Thiel recently signaled that his group wanted to move in the direction of the community, even if it meant having to stop brushing up against the regulators for a while.
As Bitcoin Magazine reports, Mara Pool, Marathon’s mining pool, will not only begin signaling its agreement to implement the Taproot fork, but its CEO has also committed to the free and transparent processing of BTC transactions:
“Marathon is committed to the core tenets of the Bitcoin community, including decentralization, inclusion, and no censorship,” said Marathon’s CEO Fred Thiel. “Over the coming week, we will be updating all our miners to the full standard Bitcoin core 0.21.1 node, including support for Taproot. By adopting the full standard Bitcoin core node, we will be validating transactions on the blockchain in the exact same way as all other miners who use the standard node. “
So would the days of promising pristine white bitcoins, fully compliant with Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) regulatory requirements and other anti-money laundering (AML) laws, be over?
This is a matter to be watched like milk on the fire, even if we can welcome an effort in the right direction by the Marathon group. Indeed, the long-awaited Taproot update of Bitcoin’s code should bring more anonymity options to the network, in addition to better scalability.
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