If there was ever a noble application of the decentralized, uncensorable technologies ideas bourne out of the crypto community, this would be it.
Any nonstandard transaction will be rejected by 90 if not 100%, miners, but if you get lucky to get someone to mine it, it will work fine with the protocol.
The nonstandard txs are any that are something more than a transfer, multisig (i.e. the ones that have some sort of smart contract capability).
This is not theoretical - literally killed my project of decentralised oracles (Orisi) back in 2014. Our beta transactions were accepted only by 10% of miners, so you had to wait for hours to get your tx through. Perhaps it changed - I think in 2018 not even one mining pool accepted that, but perhaps by now they fixed it, although I doubt that.
May seem like a small thing, but I met other projects that bumped into it. They had the tech, just didn’t manage to convinve miners to accept their transactions.
You are incorrect about what constitutes a standard.
The "smart contracts" by their own are standard - the whole Lightning Network is based on smart contracts - as well as many other protocols running live for years.
It sounds more like your specific transactions were non-standard due to excessive size, usage of non-standard opcodes, or other technical quirks.
But this was 2014, so it may have been before your time.
*. https://www.clearytradewatch.com/2018/12/ofac-lists-digital-...
You are correct that you only need one miner, but that miner has to win a block.
The sender, amount, receiver and IP address are all essentially hidden or unavailable.
Miner can still decide to censor all transactions, random transactions, transactions over certain KB size, etc - but that is probably not very useful, except maybe to attack the network as a whole.
Unfortunately Monero was intentionally designed to dump the money supply, so the vast majority of XRM was "mined" by a small group of traditional speculative capitalists.
Monero just amplifies the current plutocracy of the money system due to the algorithm of the emission curve and mining system.
It would be nice if there wasn't a crypto project that didn't try to scam people.
https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/242/how-was-the-m...
https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/858/monero-origin...
Monero has no premine, dev tax and is a 100% open source project with volunteer contributors. It's about as grassroots as it gets in the cryptocurrency space.
> so the vast majority of XRM was "mined" by a small group of traditional speculative capitalists.
While the cripple mine happened, it only lasted a couple weeks and all of these coins were sold at market value. Monero was worthless for the first couple years.
Monero has a tail emission / infinite supply making it fairer than fixed supply coins.
Disclaimer: Monero contributor
Anyone can be a miner and the decision of what gets included in the next block is determined by a competition of hashing (computing) power.
https://bitcoinexchangeguide.com/bitcoin-gentoo-client-takeo...
Obviously this is a developer issue, not a miner issue. It really does not make sense that a miner would attempt to blacklist any addresses, as they could only delay transactions proportional to their hash power.
Why? For mainly two reasons:
1) Main one: Miners can censor. But miners are not elected. As more transactions are censored by a mojority of miners, the sum of transaction fees of these transactions add up and become a honeypot/incentive. A sum which a "brave" miner could additionally include in a block they would mine (that other miners censoring won't), making themselves MORE profitable by including those. And mining being a low margin business, this is relevant. And this gets more and more relevant the more fees people are ready to pay for such transactions. Nothing is really free in life. It would cost, but the more you are ready to pay a fee, the more uncensorable it gets (if you are not the only one, which is not likely in a long term view in a world with so many countries, minorities, use cases,... ).
The condition for this to work, is
a) being able to mine anonymously (or one day you'll get arrested) and
b) a protocol favoring decentralization (meaning you can have temporarily more centralization like these days, but as long as these more centr. miners behave well and follow the rules, it isn't an issue, and when they start behaving bad, things can get better again [1]).
That is why privacy + decentralization-focused bitcoin-software development is so important
2) The second reason is technically correct, but a bit far fetched I have to admit (!), but read to the end:
- You can become a miner. Ok, you would need to buy an ASIC or better a few, but with that you finally might get lucky and mine your block with those transactions.
- But then again communities could get together and mine together. Like a small town (somewhere hypothetically where some plant grows and producing healthy drugs that are forbidden by law but helping some people who want to pay for that) and thus getting connected to a world wide financial infrastructure to participate in world wide commerce. Or countless other communities are imaginable. It just needs imagination, human creativity and time to develop those scenarios.
[1] Example where it has already happened:
- Bitcoin had moments where one miner got or got near 51% POW, and miners did switch mininig-pools to stop that.
- possibly segwit2x (not entirely sure). Although Segwit2x was circumvented by a user activated softfork, an agreement of a big part of miners wanted to change the rules, but couldn't pull it of
edit 1: formatting
edit 2: some clarifications
If new addresses are not only newly generated after every transaction but are user specific & encrypted, then I guess you would need a decentralized web, or governments could use gag orders to force hosting providers to let them spy into these servers [1]
So I guess it is easier for them to get behind addresses of services that service diverse or bigger amount of customers. One solution mentioned by an above commenter are stealth addresses
[1] At least since PRISM ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program) ) this should not sound totally inconceivable anymore
But I just took a look and it seems like they've been using the same static bitcoin addres since Feb 2020. So yeah. I guess it's not a thing they're hugely worried about.
Edit: I also suppose, the colluding miners could also try to mine a competing fork to censor a block. This would be rightfully called out as a 51% attack attempt, though.
The uncensorable is a spectrum so it is censorship resistant under certain premises. No technology is uncensorable with enough resources but Bitcoin is more uncensorable that the global banking system.