More recently, regulations which allow individual government officials to seize assets unilaterally have become common. Especially in the US, the now infamous Operation Choke Point and civil asset forfeiture programs have allowed law enforcement officials and private institutions to seize financial assets and deny financial services with little to no oversight. Thus, removing trusted custodians and creating a system with liquid, unseizable assets has the potential to provide more reliable financial services to many who might otherwise not be able to operate efficiently, or at all. This unseizability of Bitcoin is made possible only through its lack of a centralized trust requirement. While centralized e-cash and financial systems have tried to provide such reliability, regulations and business realities have nearly universally prevented it.
-A highly-related property that is equally important to the ability of Bitcoin to provide financial services to whistleblowers, foreign dissidents and porn stars is its transaction censorship resistance. While the ability of third parties to seize assets results in direct and clear monetary loss, freezing assets can have a similar effect. When an individual or organization is no longer able to make transactions to use their assets to pay for goods and services, their financial assets quickly lose their value. While Bitcoin has a very solid unsizeability story (namely that every party in the system enforces the inability of anyone to spend Bitcoin without the associated private key), its censorship resistance story is a bit more nuanced. In a world where no Bitcoin miners have more than 1% of total hash power (or something else equivalently decentralized), it should be easy to find a miner which is either anonymous and accepting all transactions or in a jurisdiction which is not attempting to censor your transactions. Of course this isn't the world we have today, and transaction censorship is one of the bigger reasons to be seriously concerned with mining centralization (for full nodes). Still, the ability of an individual to purchase hashpower (in the form of readily-available old hardware or in the form of renting it) to mine their otherwise-censored transaction is an option as long as the longest-chain rule remains in place across miners. While significantly more expensive than it would be in a truly-decentralized Bitcoin, this does allow Bitcoin to retain some of its anti-censorship properties.
+A highly-related property that is equally important to the ability of Bitcoin to provide financial services to whistleblowers, foreign dissidents and porn stars is its transaction censorship resistance. While the ability of third parties to seize assets results in direct and clear monetary loss, freezing assets can have a similar effect. When an individual or organization is no longer able to make transactions to use their assets to pay for goods and services, their financial assets quickly lose their value. While Bitcoin has a very solid unsizeability story (namely that every party in the system enforces the inability of anyone to spend Bitcoin without the associated private key), its censorship resistance story is a bit more nuanced.
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+In a world where no Bitcoin miners have more than 1% of total hash power (or something else equivalently decentralized), it should be easy to find a miner which is either anonymous and accepting all transactions or in a jurisdiction which is not attempting to censor your transactions. Of course this isn't the world we have today, and transaction censorship is one of the bigger reasons to be seriously concerned with mining centralization (for full nodes). Still, the ability of an individual to purchase hashpower (in the form of readily-available old hardware or in the form of renting it) to mine their otherwise-censored transaction is an option as long as the longest-chain rule remains in place across miners. While significantly more expensive than it would be in a truly-decentralized Bitcoin, this does allow Bitcoin to retain some of its anti-censorship properties.
If you've been around Bitcoin for long enough, you may recognize the above properties as critical to fungibility. A key property in any monetary instrument, fungibility refers to the idea that the value of one unit should be exactly equivalent to every other unit. Without unfreezeability/censorship-resistance and unseizeability, Bitcoin (and any monetary system) starts to lose fungibility. Without it, merchants and payment processors are no longer able to reasonably accept Bitcoin without checking it against a series of blacklists and jumping through hoops to ensure they will be able to spend the Bitcoin they are accepting. If confidence in Bitcoin's fungibility erodes, its utility could be significantly eroded.
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