Controversy between Samourai Wallet and Ocean after, starting from December 6, 2023, some transactions have been filtered by the client used by the mining pool.
Accusations and responses
The controversy revolves around the alleged censorship of Whirlpool CoinJoin and BIP47 transactions. Ocean, and its co-founder Luke Dashjr, have denied any form of intentional censorship. Dashjr attributes the issue to a bug in the Samourai software during transaction construction, while the wallet team accuses the mining pool of censorship.
Samourai wrote on Twitter:
The technical issue
At the core of the dispute is the transaction filtering policy used in Bitcoin Knots, the client used by the Ocean pool, which notably does not rely on Bitcoin Core. In Bitcoin Knots, an OP_RETURN limit is set at 42 bytes, while in Bitcoin Core, this limit is set at 83 bytes.
Samourai’s transactions include a 46-byte OP_RETURN field in CoinJoin transactions – the reason for this is unclear as it is an unnecessary field for the success of CoinJoin – and this causes the rejection of transactions by Ocean. Luke Dashjr wrote:
The animosity in the exchange has prevented the issue from being addressed for what it is, namely a technical matter. On one hand, Samourai’s announcement of “censorship” is certainly exaggerated; on the other hand, Luke Dashjr’s demand to adapt to the 42-byte limit for the OP_RETURN field – a feature, as mentioned, unique to the Knots implementation – even for those using Bitcoin Core, has caused tension within the Samourai team.
