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Comment by hudon | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin is neither of those things. Mining, developers and exchanges are all centralized. All a government that cares has to do to control issuance or censor transactions is regulate those entities.

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do you really understand how transactions are recorded in bitcoin? Care to educate me how a government can censor a transaction?

One example that the US government's OFAC is considering is blacklisting addresses and tainted UTXOs [0]. Miners would be forbidden by law to confirm a transaction related to a tainted UTXO. This means if the transaction is spending a tainted UTXO or sending to a blacklisted address (and thus creating a tainted UTXO), it wouldn't be confirmed. "taint" in this case travels forward in a chain of transactions and is a well documented property if you google it.

Companies like Chainalysis have become really good at not only clustering related UTXOs but also monitoring taint as UTXOs are attempted to be obfuscated. [1]

[0] https://www.coindesk.com/goodbye-fungibility-ofacs-bitcoin-b...

[1] https://www.chainalysis.com

As an aside, the patronizing tone is unwarranted. It was acceptable five years ago when the jury was out on Bitcoin, but science is slowly revealing the inadequacies of the technology. Examples here [2] and here [3] and here [4]

[2] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30177-6

[3] https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/doc/...

[4] https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.03998

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