I started a topic about this company early this year and a user pointed out their desire to censor the network;

The whole of the quoted part showed the companies game plan, but the highlighted area is more explicit.

I'm not sure it is.  Looks like this might be the third one.  We've had two topics in the Press sub along a similar theme.

BlockSeer pool:  https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/5288918.0
DCMNA pool:  https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/5310508.0


//EDIT:  Possible false alarm, all three might be the same entity.

Not sure what they're smoking at Mara but AFAIK, there's no way to fully achieve what they've claimed; Personally, I see it as a marketing strategy of some sort ^{[indirect approach, even though they're censoring some TXs]}.
^{- Luckily there are enough "normal/levelheaded" pools out there to ignore the impact such useless pools could have as a whole.}

No, it doesn't matter how much hashrate the group has. This kind of censorship can not take place on bitcoin network, at least not for long.

Basically there are only 2 scenarios where this kind of censorship happens.
1. By a very small group of miners (ie. a smaller % of the hashrate) by companies that are located in certain jurisdictions and cannot or will not move so they have to comply by the regulations and the government pressure. This does not affect the network at all.
This has always been happening. Like the case with MARA pool which is a tiny company with a tiny portion of the hashrate complying with malicious government rules.

2. By a much larger group of miners (ie. a much bigger % of the hashrate) which ends up disrupting the network but only for a short time because there is only 2 ways to move forward, the companies move to another jurisdiction or miners connect to another pool that is not malicious. Or the community is going to introduce a hardfork that bricks their billion dollar investment in one fell swoop.
I don't think this scenario will ever happen because miners who are making a bigger investment and taking a much bigger risk that regular people who just buy bitcoin, are more concerned about health of bitcoin and won't let that happen.

Not only a marketing promotion but also a way to follow anti money laundering.
It's really able to detect these operations? I don't think so, there is always some error while doing such filtering operations.
 
Meanwhile, some years ago, dark web bitcoin (from silk road) have been already sold in a government auction, so I think it's something useless since they are just providing an additional rule for their operation.

Right, I think there were several mining pools with specific preferences for transactions and this is a similar case as well but with a far worse motives. This is more of a concern than what it appears to be.

With MARA's compliance to government rules, it also means that other mining pools within their respective jurisdiction could possibly be forced to comply with their own set of rules as well and that is not limited to censorship. If there isn't any repercussions to their actions, then we could possibly see more mining pools adopting such measures or worse still, having the farms come after such regulations as well. Once 51% of the network comes under said regulations, something needs to be done urgently. Hopefully, that doesn't happen but it is still a possibility.

If it were to happen, the network would undoubtedly fork. You would have Marathon and the like mining on their "clean" chain, and everyone who is being excluded by them mining on the original chain. What happens after that is anybody's guess. The price of bitcoin and the share price of these companies would both take a huge hit I'm sure, but probably both chains would continue to the exist. The "clean" chain would be little more than something like XRP at that point - centralized, not censorship resistant, and under control of the banks and the government. We shouldn't let it come to that. We need everyone to spread the word that Marathon are anti-bitcoin and investors need to pull their money out as soon as possible. If they are successful in their goal they will kill bitcoin and therefore kill their own revenue model, and so anyone holding shares in that company will lose all their money. We need more mining pools using Stratum V2. And most of all, if everyone just extensively used the privacy enhancing tools available to them - mixing, coinjoining, trading peer to peer, etc. - then the blockchain analysis that Marathon are basing their decisions on becomes worthless and their whole business model collapses.

The nuclear option would be for all the other mining pools to ignore blocks mined by Marathon, mine a different block at the same height, and make all Marathon's blocks stale. They would quickly go out of business when all their mined blocks bring them no profit.

They claim that they are on track to reach 10 EH/s in this first wave of their roll out, which would give them around 5-6% of the total hashrate at current levels.

This is too dangerous to be executed so the former is probably the only thing that should happen. I'd assume a change from SHA256D to something else, there isn't anything preventing them from mining on the new chain either.

Most block explorers do not classify the blocks mined by Marathon pool yet. You would have to look at the hashrate of those in the unknown instead. The problem with having a small amount of hashrate is that you're subjected to far more variance than others and you have to wait quite a while for it to be considered accurate at all.

They're also still in the process of deploying, AFAIK.

In my own opinion!

These people are business people, they really know what terms/words to use in order to gain trust and close deals, investor, sales, and partnerships. They just created a way on how to would stand out from their competitors and become more secured.

But honestly, I can tell that these people can still have transactions with dirty blocks, even though they are able to trace the people who were blacklisted and don't transact with them they can still mine stuff that came from dirt. That is the trust.

Well, I don’t really think that Government doesn’t have stakes in this company. This company is too privileged, I find it like that.