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Crypto Means Absolutely Nothing Without Censorship Resistance

Censorship resistance is fundamental to any functioning cryptocurrency or blockchain project. It’s been a pillar of crypto from the start, one of the biggest reasons the whole movement got started. What it means is this: As long as a participant in the Bitcoin or whatever network follows the predetermined technical criteria to construct a valid transaction, then nobody – not the cops, not your nosy neighbor – should be able to prevent that.

So there’s zero surprise that Sam Bankman-Fried (the crypto billionaire known as SBF) kicked up controversy when the FTX founder and CEO published an article last week on crypto regulation. He talked about implementing blocklists – aka a roster of wallet addresses banned from interacting with a blockchain because they’re suspected of being used for nefarious purposes – and, relatedly, respecting the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control’s (OFAC) sanctions lists by maintaining “an on-chain list of the sanctioned addresses … maintained by either OFAC or by a responsible actor.”

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Here’s the problem. Removing censorship resistance defeats the entire purpose and value proposition of cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is supposed to be about banking the unbanked, about granting open access to financial tools, about empowering otherwise unempowered…

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