The same is true for a blockchain where the same organisation controls all the nodes, which is the scenario at hand.

If they know which addresses belong to Wikileaks

That's a feature of anonymity, not the blockchain.

But that's not a bad thing from the perspective of most of these "OMG blockchain" uses that are internal or with a controlled set of partners. In practice, very few people want to be forced to do business with somebody they later decide they don't want to do business with.

Even if they did want that for some reason, most countries have anti money-laundering laws where you have to be able to stop doing business with certain parties.

Wikileaks was never "booted off the normal bank system", only a few US banks (BoA, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union) refused to send money to them. Bank transfers from anywhere else always worked fine.

When 90%+ of your income is routed through VISA, MasterCard and PayPal, getting booted off those is a sufficiently fatal blow. I don't know (or care) if this was the case with Wikileaks, but if it happens to your retail business you are toast.

These private institutions have way too much arbitrary power to decide the fates of others with opaque & inconsistent reasoning-- I see nearly anything providing a check against that power as useful. I'm no longer convinced blockchain tech is a viable answer, but I do think having a variety of non-consolidated payment processors to choose from is a good thing.

The bottom line is that this isn't a real problem for legitimate businesses. If you're a business owner who's been shut out of the western banking system then your business is DOA whether or not the business accepts bitcoin. Yes, bitcoin is great if you're a rogue political organization like wikileaks, but this is a very uncommon scenario.

There have been numerous, widely varied reports of legitimate businesses having their funds completely frozen for an unspecified amount of time - often long enough to sink a fledgling startup - simply because they were new and "made too much money too fast".

Payment processors have also been known to discriminate against perfectly legal businesses for a long list of random things some old jackass in a suit decided were too 'unsavory'.

I think these organizations are wrong to meddle so much rather than being passive facilitators as originally envisioned. They have a right to exclude things which put their assets at risk, as well as a legal obligation to assist law enforcement where appropriate, but beyond that neutrality and privacy should be the rule.

> Payment processors have also been known to discriminate against perfectly legal businesses for a long list of random things some old jackass in a suit decided were too 'unsavory'.

Typically, it's because of fraud, not unsavory-ness. Fraud on the customer's side, not the business'.

The solution to that is not making every transaction put the weight of fraud solely on the customer.