Censored Ethereum Blocks Hit the 51% Threshold over the Past 24 Hours | Hacker News Reader

Censored Ethereum Blocks Hit the 51% Threshold over the Past 24 Hours

coindesk.com

43 pointspr337h4m20 comments

Can't someone else create another relay like MEV-boost that doesn't exclude Tornado Cash transactions?

I don't think miners cared that they were processing non-compliant transactions, why are validators/relays (now miner equivalents) caring now under PoS

some of them are, this is why there's a censorship threshold ( > 51%). Meaning that mixed transactions will take longer to make it to the chain

Did the crypto community see this coming?

It always seemed pretty obvious that the government would succeed in doing this. It seemed inevitable.

The Bitcoin community yes. That's partly why Taproot was activated, because it helps almost all transactions look the same.

Fungibility is an essential part of what makes a money good money.

For example US dollars can't be invalidated just because trace cocaine can be found of them or they don't look as good as a new US dollar, or they took part in money laundering some time ago and the last owner didn't know.

The parent is a highly misinformative comment.

Three things are true here

1) If you dig into the details, the actual censorship is so weak in practice that calling it "censored ethereum blocks" is mostly false.

2) There are great reasons to think that the weak form of censorship this does in fact comprise is an inherently temporary problem with ethereum. And pretty much no good reasons to think it'll end up being a long-term state of affairs.

3) Nobody informed was surprised by this. It became an outcome whose high likelihood became generally known within industry shortly after the tornado contracts were added to the OFAC sanctions list.

source: I'm a low-grade ethereum insider.

If you would like to know (much) more, this recent podcast episode with a top ethereum researcher explains the past, present, and future of this issue in great detail

- video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azjpYTB7PVE

- podcast: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/134-ethereum-unsensored-with-j...

Well, there have been sceptics that said that PoS is more prone to centralized control than PoW. Seems like they've been right.

I'm a bit behind the times with crypto, but my question was closer to this:

Didn't people foresee that governments would control crypto when it interfaces with the real world? They can pressure the banks, the exchanges, and any crypto infrastructure within their borders.

The government can't stop crypto completely, but they can make it really painful to use and thus reduce its value.

Assume that I'm asking in good faith, but with imperfect knowledge.

Of course they did, Adam Back and many others in the OG crypto community risked going into prison for exporting cryptography algorithms on T-shirts, as they believed that end-to-end communication and privacy is a basic human right.

They are still fighting for the same thing for the last 30 years, just now with peer-to-peer money.

Sancioning people based on the country they were born is the antithesis of what many of us are still fighting for.

They did. The primary solution to this is decentralization. The more people holding up a project, the greater effort a government must exert to stop it.

> Well, there have been skeptics that said that PoS is more prone to centralized control than PoW. Seems like they've been right.

Except nothing that happen actually proves their point. PoW had "luxury" of being concentrated outside of US and yet, miners censored.

Also, whole story is barely news. Tornado Cash txs don't get included in some blocks. Which means that they have to wait 30 seconds instead of 15 seconds. Yeah, the sky is falling.

Please note that both mev-boost authors and core-devs are aligned w.r.t censorship resistance being the most important feature of Ethereum. They all work to assure that even such non-events like this are really hard to cause.

The 51% threshold in this metric is not meaningful like it is for block creation. It only means that it takes slightly longer for a transaction that interacts with contracts on the OFAC list to be included.

Glad I sold all my eth last December. Going to zero.

Alternative headline: Small majority of crypto community obeys laws?

Didn't know the US Treasury had purview over the entire world or Internet.

Anti money laundering is a global system with widespread coordination and cooperation between countries, spearheaded and supported by the UN and most UN member states.[1]

The OFAC action against tornadocash and users of tornadocash was a direct response to the use of Tornadocash to launder funds to do with North Korea.[2] You can agree or disagree with this, but the US and OFAC have consistently claimed the right (as most countries do) to intervene to enforce sanctions. They do this in conventional financial transactions, so it doesn't seem out of the ordinary at all that they should do so in crypto transactions especially given that North Korea has been active in using crypto to facilitate sanctions busting (eg [3]).

The fact that the flashbots crowd have decided to use the ofac list as part of compiling blocks in their relay and their relay has become the most popular shows that for the most part validators don't really care that much about enforcing the ability of people who use tornadocash to transact conveniently on the ethereum network. I expect this will reach an equilibrium where tornado users will have to pay to use certain relays that then have to pay more MEV (essentially bribing the validator) to get their blocks confirmed.

[1] https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/money-laundering/global-progr... [2] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0916 [3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61090064

GP is correct that OPs post makes no sense. Most validators around the world seem to be under no under legal obligation to exclude TC transactions from the blocks that they mine, and in particular to follow TC sanctions - their local laws don't require it, US law likely doesn't require it, and morally they are free to ignore US laws.

Whether those in the US are/will be is clearly uncertain. If OFAC or the DoJ wanted to, they could state their opinion on the matter, and a court could decide if they are right. That this very normal process of a rule-of-law based society is not working in the US (the government embracing vagueness coupled with insane punishments) is an issue.

US DoJ claimed jurisdiction over all of Ethereum due to significant concentration of nodes within the US. So, according to them.

Seems pretty obvious at least since Dot Com legal problems started, no?

KYC ring a bell?

There is no legal requirement to perform this kind of censoring. It's being done out of excessive caution.

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