: “Not even one TX has been blocked on ETH”
Ethereum bulls have rebuffed claims that the network is prone to censorship after Merge. One of them argued that “not one” transaction had been censored.
Justin Bons , Cyber Capital founder and chief investment officer, stated in a 19-part thread that he sent to his 29,100 followers Oct. 17. He argued contrary to “what some Bitcoiners falsely claim”, not one transaction on Ethereum was stopped by Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctions.
Bons was referring specifically to recent reports that Ethereum is too dependent on OFAC-compliant miner extractable value (MEV-Boost relays , since the Merge.
It was reported last week that more than 51% Ethereum blocks now comply with U.S. sanctions, having transitioned to proof of stake (PoS).
Manager of crypto-funds argued that despite OFAC-compliant MEVBoost relays becoming more common, it becomes censorship when producers refuse construction on blocks that are not compliant. This would lead to forking and splitting the chain.
“Even with 50% OFAC compliance a non-compliant TX will still be confirmed in 30 seconds!” Comparable to BTC’s variable 10min!
Bons argued that it takes only one validator to include an OFAC-sanctioned transaction into the canonical chain.
This means that only a small number of validators/miners are able to counter such censorship in both ETH and BTC. He explained that censorship can be prevented by a mere 1% of the population.
Bons claimed that most of the backlash was due to Bitcoin “Bitcoiners”. However, Ethereum with its PoS consensus mechanism is “less vulnerable” to Bitcoin ( Bitcoin) under proofs-of-work (PoW), because institutions are not financially incentivized try to split the chain.
Related: Ethereum could be more susceptible to censorship — Blockchain analyst
Ethereum developers are also working to improve Ethereum’s censorship resistance — Terence Tsao, an Ethereum developer from Prysmatic labs, announced on Oct. 17 that he and Marius van der Wijden had started building a solution.
We have begun prototyping features together with the legend @vdWijden to allow the proposer to choose between a local block or a builder block at the highest fee.
The first step for censorship resistancehttps://t.co/HyzUBZuB6V https://t.co/GGuAIegW5H— terence.eth (@terencechain)
October 17, 2022
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, recently suggested a partial block auction solution. This would allow block builders to only decide a portion of the block’s contents.
Flashbots, an Ethereum research and development company, is looking to quickly roll out its fully decentralized block builder that supports EVMs — Single Unifying Auctions Value Expression (SUAVE), in order to combat censorship.
The Ethereum protocol will be upgraded in order of importance during the next 6-12 month:
– Beacon Chain withdrawals
– PBS/crLists/related censorship-resistance upgrades
– Proto-danksharding (EIP-4844)My humble opinion is that scaling right now is more important than censorship resistance.
— sassal.eth (@sassal0x)
October 15, 2022
The United States Treasury Department, added 40 cryptocurrency addresses linked to Tornado Cash to its Specially Designated Nationals List of OFAC, . This effectively banned U.S. citizens from accessing the mixing service.
