Ethereum becoming censoring complaint?

[_act_]

51% of Ethereum blocks are now compliant with OFAC standards, raising censorship concerns

OFAC stands for the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the entity in charge of enforcing United States economic sanctions, while MEV-Boost relays are centralized entities that act as trusted mediators between block producers and block builders. In this way, all Ethereum proof-of-stake (PoS) validators can outsource their block production to other builders.

This metric tracks how many blocks were built by OFAC-compliant MEV-Boost relays since the Merge. Due to Ethereum's upgrade to a PoS consensus, MEV-Boost has been enabled to a more representative distribution of block proposers, rather than a small group of miners under proof-of-work (PoW).

According to what Lachan Feeney, Labrys' CEO noted that in hard censorship, that no matter how much you paid or how long you wait, that sanctioned transactions would never get included into a block. That nodes would be forced by regulation to discard those blocks that contains sanctioned transactions. Also that in case of soft censorship, when sanctioned transactions would eventually be validated, that it would likely result in long waits and high-priority fees, making the user experience substandard.

According to Labrys' page, there are currently seven major MEV-oost relays including Flashbots, BloXroute Max Profit, BloXroute Ethical, BloXroute Regulated, BlockNative, Manifold and Eden. "Of the 7 available major relays, only 3 do not censor according to OFAC compliance requirements. OFAC compliant relays will not include any transactions that interact with the Tornado Cash smart contract or other sanctioned wallet addresses as designated by OFAC," stated the company.

[Tytanowy Janusz]

Well we all knew that merge will destroy the main advantage ETH had over others smart contract platforms (like bsc, avax, ada, link and dozen more). ETH was slow and expensive but decentralized. Now its centralized, slow and expensive. Good luck fighting competitors now.

But I don't get this censorship. Is it possible to achieve it with >50% of network? There are many solo mining nodes with little above 32 eth. If they succeed to mine a block they will include any TX they want no matter if censored by majority or not. So even if 90% will censor transactions my tx will still be included as soon as one of remaining 10% of nodes will mine a block. Am I wrong here?

[vv181]

Isn't it always has been?

When the merge hasn't occurred, how many users that directly interact with the Ethereum blockchain using third-party RPC like Infura? that single point of centralization always opens up the possibility of censorship, most users are using someone else RPC which could mean they ought to adhere to the owner rules and also explicitly trusting them. So without a surprise a centralization will became more and more concerning within Ethereum ecosystem.

[JeromeTash]

ETH was slow and expensive but decentralized.

Expensive fees yes, but was it ever slow?

if I recall well, even with POW, new blocks were being confirmed within seconds. Something like 10 to 20 seconds on average

Now its centralized, slow and expensive. Good luck fighting competitors now.

It still had a big advantaged over shit chains though, like BSC 

[Tytanowy Janusz]

It still had a big advantaged over shit chains though, like BSC  

what advantage ETH have over BSC? From user perspective everything new happens on BSC. There is 3x more traffic on BSC (1M TX vs 3M TX). Its better to use bsc for everyday crypto payments becasue of low fees and
certainty of low fees (ETH fees are sometimes low sometimes 100$ per tx). ETH was different than BSC before merge (more expensive but decentralized) so it hit different user base, different purpose, different target. You could have cold wallet on decentralized ETH for safety and hot wallet on BSC for convenience. Now its less decentralized and my bet is that with future updates ETH will move towards even bigger centralization becoming a thing that we were escaping from.