The Ethereum network has gained a lot of attention over the past few months due to its steady increase in block size. The increase was sparked by an announcement from Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum and inventor of smart contract technology, that he would step down as an advisor to one of the platform’s largest mining pools. The news came after the mining pool announced it would not support certain aspects of proposed changes to the Ethereum protocol. This led many users on Reddit and other social media platforms to call for a fork (or split) in the network so that they could continue using their preferred version without compromise.
You may have heard the term “Office of Foreign Assets Control” before, but what exactly does it mean? The OFAC is a U.S. Treasury Department agency responsible for enforcing economic sanctions against countries, firms, and individuals with ties to terrorism or specific regimes in Iran and North Korea. These sanctions are designed to restrict trade with certain entities that are considered harmful to U.S interests.
The OFAC maintains lists of sanctioned addresses, persons and entities that should be avoided by U.S citizens when sending funds or otherwise conducting business transactions on the internet in order to avoid falling afoul of these rules themselves—and losing their hard earned money!
Ethereum Might Be Censored
The move has raised concerns about censorship due to the compliance with OFAC-issued sanctions addresses.
This is because even though it is not blacklisted, the address will be blocked by Ethereum miners who will work automatically to block any transaction that comes from a blacklisted address. The Ethereum Foundation has said that its decision was driven by security reasons: “Our intention here was not to cause harm or contribute to censorship, but rather try and ensure that users were informed when they were sending funds to potentially malicious actors.”
thereum is a decentralized platform that runs applications on a shared global infrastructure.
Ethereum is an open-source, public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform and operating system featuring smart contract functionality. Ethereum also provides a cryptocurrency token called “ether”, which can be transferred between accounts and used to compensate participant nodes for computations performed.
