Permissionless and Censorship Resistance

Within the Bitcoin network, each transaction is viewed in terms of protocol rules which considers each transfer independently and anonymously, appling no extra benefit to any particular bitcoin address or network participant. This means a transaction is considered correct on the basis of non-discriminatory rules that cannot consider background, status, or income-level. The bitcoin itself is spendable only through a knowledge of cryptographic keys that users can independently manage and store. So long as the user keeps this information confidential, the bitcoin cannot be confiscated by anyone.

Bitcoin is censorship resistant because it economically punishes miners who do not include the transactions offering the highest fees. Miners who choose to exclude transactions offering higher fees than transactions they include in their blocks will have lower revenues than their non-censoring competitors. Over time, censoring miners will be less profitable and may therefore be pushed off the network as they are unable to compete with non-censoring miners.