Just wait until staking is merged, 67% of the pools are run by centralized companies wanting to do business in the US, and they start filtering at the transaction level, including or not in blocks based on these same dirty metrics.
Lots of people who became paper rich are going to go the other direction just as fast.
If they filter transactions, ETH will become worthless, causing the relevant stakers to lose all their money since by definition they are the ones with the most money.
Seems like the system will punish censorship as designed.
They will be the majority though, enough to choose the history of the ledger, it's more that they won't allow other validators to join the network, who could invalidate their choices. Thus, the penalties will not be applied.
How does ETH do to stop miners from rejecting or preferring transactions for blocks today? Pretty sure there have been some interesting stories about transaction front running and other tactics to abuse the system for personal gain (which is a fundamental issue in the unregulated blockchain ecosystem)
Interesting point. Instead of needing to be part of the good-old-boys club, on a decentralized network, anyone can try being corrupt. Hacking works similarly.
The penalties are outside of the network. The penalties are that nobody wants to use a cryptocurrency with transaction filtering, when there are so many without it. Thus, the real-world value of the network token decreases drastically.
There are also a bunch of people sitting on the sidelines, waiting for a regulated network.
Since all of these things are basically just printed money based on the faith of the people, and since ETH is number 2, I think it will survive centralization and regulatory capture, since most of the populace could care less about these things. It just happens to be that the ethos of crypto libertarianism isn't that important to valuing the network.
> If they filter transactions, ETH will become worthless
I'm not sure about that. Some hodlers of ETH might be fine with governments being able to censor transactions. In that case what will determine the price of ETH is also how much of it these people own.
True, but I could envision a scenario in which someone working for the government might interpret his actions as bypassing measures put in place to enforce a sanction. Regardless of how valid or invalid it was for his account to be blocked in the first place.
Lots of people who became paper rich are going to go the other direction just as fast.