BlocksInform
Marathon Digital Holdings, one of the largest enterprise Bitcoin self-mining companies in North America, has successfully mined its first “clean” block.
In late March, the company announced that it would be launching the first North American Bitcoin mining pool fully compliant with U.S. regulations, including anti-money laundering (AML) and Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC’s) standards.
“While institutional interest in Bitcoin is accelerating, many large funds and corporations have expressed concerns over purchasing bitcoin that may have been tainted by nefarious actors,” said Merrick Okamoto, Marathon’s chairman and CEO, in the announcement.
No rewrites were found The firm announced that it expects to switch entirely to the new pool by the first quarter of 2022 and will begin accepting Bitcoin mining companies established in the U.S. to join the pool on June 1, 2021.
The Marathon system allows for the exclusive use of DMG Blockchain's proprietary technology. Since this is the case, the pool stops processing bitcoin transactions for someone listed on OFAC’s Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (SDN).
The idea that Bitcoin includes its own transactions in a block seems counterproductive to many in the space. Bitcoin miners shift transactions and vary the “nonce” in an attempt to find a valid block hash, and are usually economically incentivized to pick transactions based on their fees.
Essentially, it violates Bitcoin's intrinsic properties, such as fungibility and censorship resistance, as a medium of exchange. It is arguably dangerous to some vital Bitcoin properties as a medium of exchange, such as its fungibility and censorship resistance. Bitcoin address that's associated with sanctioned individuals has been the target of sanctions in the past.
First, the office published a pair of Iranian nationals that were described by the legal staff as individuals that “U.S. persons generally are prohibited from dealing with.” Compared to the mining business, which operates in a purely free market. The office’s first publication of that kind involved two Iranian nationals described as individuals that “U.S. persons generally are prohibited from dealing with.”
These and most other Bitcoin participants’ actions are dictated by the game-based nature of monetary goods. Bitcoiners, most of whom are free-market believers, ultimately trust that the market will resolve itself, with game theory helping it gravitate to the most efficient side. The fact that Marathon’s mining pool is relatively insignificant is to be noted as well. Since Marathon's hashing power amounts to less than 6% of the total Bitcoin hash rate at the time of writing, it poses a minimal threat to Bitcoin users, currently.
The mining pool would need a much higher percentage of Bitcoin’s hash rate before it would start making an actual impact. The company’s hashing power accounts for less than 6% of the total Bitcoin hash rate at the time of writing, per Blockchain.com.
Therefore, Marathon’s decision to mine only “clean” blocks currently pose a minimal threat to Bitcoin users having their transactions censored. In late March, Marathon Digital Holdings announced the company's plans to launch the first Bitcoin mining pool that fully adheres to U.S. regulations, such as anti-money laundering (AML) and Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) standards. And most miners, which are mostly geographically dispersed outside of the U.S., have little to no reason to discriminate transactions based on American legislation.
