[betwixthewires]

Well, they're not custodians exactly. The way they work is not really cleanly analogous to the system OFAC is designed to interact with.

1 is true, but reframed: tools people use de facto decide what infrastructure they run on, and therefore what infrastructure those people use their tools on. it's not as controversial when framed in an unbiased way. We are just describing network effects.

As far as the twitter thread goes, there's a 3rx option: the big validators can no longer validate. Remember, validators aren't the only ones that validate blocks, all nodes do, validators validate transactions and finalize epochs. If they refuse to validate a valid block proposed by another validator that the rest of the network sees is valid, they basically have to fork themselves off onto their own, valueless chain. If most validators start refusing to finalize blocks, their stake gets slashed and they no longer validate. They have no choice but to violate OFAC if it is deemed that finalizing a block which contains transactions they didn't and wouldn't include is a violation, so in that scenario they'd have no choice but to stop validating. The other side of this hill to me looks like a lot of decentralized, anonymous validators, and I'm happy with that.