The 3rd Largest Bitcoin Mining Pool Might be Censoring Transactions

F2Pool, the 3rd largest Bitcoin mining pool, might be censoring transactions from an address subject to U.S. Government sanctions.

The Bitcoin development-focused blogger 0xB10C wrote No.20 that his "miningpool-observer" project "detected six missing transactions spending from OFAC-sanctioned addresses." OFAC stands for the Office of Foreign Assets Control, a U.S. Government agency efforts to enforce economic sanctions.

"The transactions missing from F2Pool's block are, however, likely filtered." according to the blogger.

A mining pool is a group of cryptocurrency miners who combine their computational resources over a network to strengthen the probability of finding a block or successfully mining for cryptocurrency. And participants in a mining pool can, relatively easily, switch to a different pool.

F2Pool is responsible for about 14% of mined Bitcoin blocks over the past year, the third-most after Foundry USA's 30% and AntPool's 22%, based on data from Blockchain.com.