Marathon Digital has decided to reconfigure its “sanctions-compliant” bitcoin mining pool after the community declared itself unhappy with it.
Fred Thiel, its CEO, was the one who confirmed the changes: “Over the coming week, we will be updating all our miners to the full standard Bitcoin Core 0.21.1 node, including support for Taproot. By adopting the full standard Bitcoin core node, we will be validating transactions on the blockchain in the exact same way as all other miners who use the standard node.”
Regarding the controversy, Thiel said: “There’s a certain amount of Bitcoin politics involved here. On the one hand, you have groups in the bitcoin community who are all about maximum decentralization. They are against the whole concept of doing anything that has to do with financial regulatory compliance or government regulation. Then there are the institutional investors who like the fact that people are trying to make the blockchain more compliant because it makes it safer for you to invest.”