Ocean Mining Pool Faces Censorship Dispute Over Excluded Transactions

Kruw, the developer behind BIP459, publicly challenged the miner known as “Powre” on October 30, claiming the intentional exclusion of his transaction effectively hijacked the pool’s hashrate. The comparison provided by Kruw showed a significant drop in block weight—from 3.99 million to 2.93 million units—and a shortfall in fee collection. He argued that such actions harm other participants in Ocean’s TIDES payout system and urged pool representative “Coinjoined Chris” to intervene by penalizing the miner.

Chris defended the pool’s DATUM setup, which grants individual miners the autonomy to construct their own block templates. While he acknowledged that the missed fees were economically suboptimal, he rejected the notion of enforcing centralized selection policies. According to Chris, imposing such mandates would undermine the fundamental control miners hold over their work. He countered that a shortfall in fee collection does not inherently constitute censorship, noting that propagation delays and varying mempool access often lead to legitimate differences in block composition. Kruw remained unconvinced, asserting that the pool should use its payout structure to enforce profitability standards and reject work that fails to meet minimum fee thresholds.