Can a Monero account / address get blocked?
Are there any actions that might limit the access to the account?
Add a comment
|
It is impossible for a miner or any other blockchain observer to know whether any transactions are destined for a particular wallet address (or wallet account). This is because wallet addresses do not appear on the blockchain at all.
Monero instead uses stealth addressing, which encrypts the destination of the transaction such that only the recipient can scan the blockchain to see that any particular transaction is destined for them.
When outputs (which are amounts of Monero) are sent to an address, the sender will know which outputs are sent. So an exchange, for example, will know what outputs were sent by the exchange to the wallet address you told the exchange about.
It could theoretically be possible that miners could decide to censor transactions that attempted to reference those outputs in any ring signature, thus preventing those particular outputs from being spent in the future.
It is most likely, however, that not all miners would agree to censor those outputs. This would lead to a blockchain fork, where one group is recognizing certain transactions as valid and others are considering them invalid due to their decision to censor.
In such a circumstance, the outputs would only be spendable on the fork of the blockchain that did not decide to censor.
Because Monero miners are spread across the world in many different legal jurisdictions, it would be very difficult to force miners to perform any kind of censorship.
-
3A relevant point here is that a new output will typically quickly get included in rings by third parties, so any attempt to organize a blacklist will hurt unrelated parties as their transactions will get rejected as well. This effect compounds since the outputs of those secondary transactions also start getting used in rings, etc. So you can't practically reorg to remove one transaction, because it invalidates a lot of unrelated transactions in the process (unless you somehow manage to do it very very fast). – user36303 May 9 '19 at 17:10
