A dispute over transaction censorship has erupted in the Bitcoin mining world after developer Kruw accused an Ocean pool miner of excluding his consolidation transaction from block 973,817 — a move he says left the block earning 7.68% less in transaction fees than an expected template.
The exchange began Oct. 30 on X, where Kruw posted a block comparison and asked Ocean’s CoinJoined representative, Chris, to intervene. Kruw identified the miner as “Powre” and said the excluded transfer was his consolidation transaction (he included the transaction hash and a screenshot). The screenshot compared an “expected” block with 3,580 transactions and ~3.99M weight units to the actual mined block of 1,698 transactions and ~2.93M weight units. Rounded transaction fees in the comparison were 0.017 BTC versus 0.016 BTC, producing the 7.68% shortfall Kruw highlighted. The singled-out transaction paid 223 satoshis (0.15 sat/vB) and was first seen about four minutes before the block was mined.
Chris responded by explaining Ocean’s DATUM setup, which lets individual miners construct their own block templates. He said some miners pick the highest-fee transactions while others apply different selection policies, and defended their right to make that choice even if he personally supports more CoinJoin, PayJoin and anchor transactions. “TIDES rewards contributed pow according to our payout rules, not whether OCEAN approves of a miner’s tx selection,” he wrote, noting that pool payouts shouldn’t be used to police miners’ template decisions.
Kruw argued the opposite: leaving fees on the table hurts other miners in the pool and the block was “partially emptied.” He proposed a centralized check — effectively rejecting shares that produce blocks with noticeably lower fees (suggesting responses like “Rejected share, check mempool connectivity”) — to discourage miners from using templates that undercut expected fee collection.
Chris pushed back on the premise that a single percentage gap proves censorship. He noted mempool divergence, propagation delays, private transactions, and differing relay policies mean there isn’t a single “correct” fee total for every node at any moment. He also challenged who would set acceptable thresholds (e.g., 99% or 95%) and how the pool would handle the many edge cases this would create.
The debate exposes a real tension in mining pools: preserve individual miner autonomy to choose block contents (and potentially protect privacy-enhancing transactions), or enforce pool-wide standards to maximize and equalize fee income. Kruw favors centralized profitability checks to prevent what he sees as avoidable lost revenue; Chris favors keeping DATUM’s miner control intact while encouraging preferred transaction types via social or incentive methods rather than payout enforcement.
No technical resolution was announced in the exchange. The incident highlights ongoing questions about miner-level censorship, mempool dynamics, and how pools should balance financial efficiency with miner sovereignty and privacy-preserving transaction types.
The exchange began Oct. 30 on X, where Kruw posted a block comparison and asked Ocean’s CoinJoined representative, Chris, to intervene. Kruw identified the miner as “Powre” and said the excluded transfer was his consolidation transaction (he included the transaction hash and a screenshot). The screenshot compared an “expected” block with 3,580 transactions and ~3.99M weight units to the actual mined block of 1,698 transactions and ~2.93M weight units. Rounded transaction fees in the comparison were 0.017 BTC versus 0.016 BTC, producing the 7.68% shortfall Kruw highlighted. The singled-out transaction paid 223 satoshis (0.15 sat/vB) and was first seen about four minutes before the block was mined.
Chris responded by explaining Ocean’s DATUM setup, which lets individual miners construct their own block templates. He said some miners pick the highest-fee transactions while others apply different selection policies, and defended their right to make that choice even if he personally supports more CoinJoin, PayJoin and anchor transactions. “TIDES rewards contributed pow according to our payout rules, not whether OCEAN approves of a miner’s tx selection,” he wrote, noting that pool payouts shouldn’t be used to police miners’ template decisions.
Kruw argued the opposite: leaving fees on the table hurts other miners in the pool and the block was “partially emptied.” He proposed a centralized check — effectively rejecting shares that produce blocks with noticeably lower fees (suggesting responses like “Rejected share, check mempool connectivity”) — to discourage miners from using templates that undercut expected fee collection.
Chris pushed back on the premise that a single percentage gap proves censorship. He noted mempool divergence, propagation delays, private transactions, and differing relay policies mean there isn’t a single “correct” fee total for every node at any moment. He also challenged who would set acceptable thresholds (e.g., 99% or 95%) and how the pool would handle the many edge cases this would create.
The debate exposes a real tension in mining pools: preserve individual miner autonomy to choose block contents (and potentially protect privacy-enhancing transactions), or enforce pool-wide standards to maximize and equalize fee income. Kruw favors centralized profitability checks to prevent what he sees as avoidable lost revenue; Chris favors keeping DATUM’s miner control intact while encouraging preferred transaction types via social or incentive methods rather than payout enforcement.
No technical resolution was announced in the exchange. The incident highlights ongoing questions about miner-level censorship, mempool dynamics, and how pools should balance financial efficiency with miner sovereignty and privacy-preserving transaction types.