This article is a translation of the German IOTA Beginner’s Guide by .
Can transactions be censored?
Of course, with IOTA it is not possible to censor individual transactions. Each user who issues a transaction validates up to eight other transactions. If a validator (fullnode) wants to censor a transaction, it also censors all transactions that directly or indirectly approve the transaction to be censored. Even if all the major Mana holders cooperated, they could not just ignore a particular transaction, but would have to ignore all the transactions of another user that builds on it.
The point, however, is not that it would be impossible to create rules that ignore certain transactions, but it is not really feasible if only parts of the network have these different rules. The nodes would form completely different tangles, and you would essentially censor all transactions from anyone who didn’t follow those rules. Nodes could not “secretly” decide to ignore certain transactions without someone noticing the behavior of these large Mana holders (this would essentially be a hard fork for the network).
Furthermore, nodes that are not synchronized will get an error message and will not be able to participate in the network. When a full node comes online after being offline, it has to listen to the network and download everything to see the status of the ledger. It will look at the consensus and take into account the status of the high Mana nodes. Restarting a node, is similar to starting a new node from scratch.
Original source
https://iota-einsteiger-guide.de/transaktionen-zensieren.html
Last Updated on 16. February 2021