Every well-known blockchain network is subject to censorship due to a "privileged set of entities" that can change the way how distributed networks work, said Trail of Bits, a research firm.
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In a report for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the firm wrote that maintainers of the software can modify the nature of blockchain as the data and the code are not "necessarily semantically immutable." The report notes:
"Not only can the state of the blockchain be retroactively changed through modifications to the blockchain’s software, but the semantics of individual transactions [...]."
The researchers emphasize that the number of entities sufficient to disrupt a blockchain is relatively low: four ff-or the Bitcoin blockchain, two for Ethereum, and less than a dozen for most Proof-of-Stake networks.
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