I have heard this potential attack on transactions discussed. While this could be done what would likely happen is that other miners not being paid would pick up the "censored" transactions. This is one of many reasons keep mining dispersed through different jurisdictions. In general bitcoin's approach is based on incentives and if you want to do things like this it will be very expensive to do so and even if you can do them you can't do them for long.
Someone wrote a great article a while back that outlined many attack vectors that could be taken on bitcoin. I can't recall who wrote it or where.
but the “for profit” incentive can be distorted. no company will deny the holy water that is public funds, so that very incentive is what makes bitcoin open to attack. ethirium has like what 50-70% of their blocks effectively sanctioned and people are okey with it.
it seems to me geographical distribution is probably the most important PoW metric?
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This isn't the article I was thinking of but it is worth looking at. Attacker has a lot of computing power.
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If you think every miner (including individual bitcoiners) will take dollars from the US to censor transactions I don't know what to tell you. Public companies would for sure.
I agree with you on Eth but if you haven't noticed bitcoiners are very different from eth heads. If you believe there is a future with eth you really don't understand why bitcoin is even needed.
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