“Censorship Must Be Tolerated,” Ethereum Creator Says About Validators

“I am a solo domestic validator in country A. We are at war with country B and I decide that I will not take donations for their army when it is my turn to validate a block”, said a validator on Twitter, who adds the question:

“Should this validator: be banned for censorship, voluntarily leave or be tolerated?”

Martin Köppelmann of Gnosis, a longtime Ethereum dApp developer, replied that “ideally” the validator wouldn’t even have these options.

But validators have options, as about 50% of Ethereum blocks are currently censoring Tornado Cash, a cryptocurrency mixing service recently approved by the US Treasury.

Commenting on the miner, Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, said:

“I would say ‘tolerate’.

Cutting, leaking or socially coordinating something should only be considered for massively reorganizing other people’s blocks, not making wrong choices about what to put in your own block.

Any other response threatens to turn the ETH community into morality police.

I would say “be tolerated”. Cutting or leaking or socially coordinated something should only be considered to fix other people’s blocks, not to make wrong choices about what to put in your own blocks.

Any other answer risks turning the ETH community into morality police

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 17, 2022

Koppelmann said: “But the goal is for validators to actively ‘manage content’ about what goes in and what doesn’t, or the goal is to minimize their role in content curation as much as possible to a point where, ideally, only fee is the deciding factor. ?”

Vitalik: “No, validators actively curating is not the point. It’s more a matter of what level of reaction is appropriate for what level of offense.”

Koppelmann: “For the record, in this particular poll I would also vote ‘tolerate’.”

Permissible Censorship on Ethereum?

Ethereum Proof of Stake (PoS) validators, such as Bitcoin Proof of Work (PoW) miners, have a choice of which transactions to include in their blocks, if any, and in what order. In bitcoin, for example, miners generally do not include censorship in transactions.

Neutrality is maintained here, with respect to this Country A and Country B, by both countries with equal access to the network.

So if A doesn’t record B’s transactions, then B can record B and A’s transactions and A can’t do anything about it in bitcoin.

This leads us to the logical assumption in bitcoin that such network-level censorship would not work, and therefore the principle of bitcoin is net-level neutrality.

But it is not a rigid principle, it is not a network rule, it is not a ‘is’ but a consequence-based ‘should’.

It doesn’t work much differently on Ethereum, except if you fork someone else’s block, you get banned.

This is a network-level penalty where a portion of the Ethereum is taken from the balance of your 32 ethers needed to be a validator. Sanctions vary according to severity, and for repeat offenders this amounts to being kicked out of the network as a validator.

Transactions FROM and TO Tornado Cash continue to move and are processed over the network, although 50% of validators do not record such transactions and sites such as Etherscan display the message “Error:403 – Forbidden: Access is denied” when you try to explore an address.

However, exploiting it falls under freedom of information, and the open source code is there too, so you can just run your own node and still access it.

And those transactions keep moving because the 50% validators they censor don’t censor validators that don’t.

That 50%, or even a higher percentage, these validators can’t censor without getting banned, and if they did, it would be based on a lot of innocent transactions being censored as well, making it impractical.

Tolerating censorship: principle of neutrality

‘Tolerate’ censorshiptherefore it can only mean that the neutrality principlenot least because getting involved at the protocol level in what would be called positive injunctions in the law – this is where you instruct someone to do something rather than do nothing – becomes socially complicated, but also, more importantly , it gets very technically complicated.

Perhaps this can be done if one really wants to work on coming up with a formula that validates what the validators are and don’t include in their blocks, and can make some sort of principled – neutral – statement of what should have been included, or actually shouldn’t be.

This would probably require a database or Excel spreadsheet, managed by humans, and even then it’s not very clear if this can be done at a technical level.

So ‘tolerate’ might translate more like ‘that’s how the network works’ and ‘you can censor if you want in your own blocks, but the network doesn’t censor’.

If we take this to country A and country B it just means that both countries need to get some Ether so they can validate their own transactions if necessary because the network doesn’t get involved as the network guarantees equal access but not a number equal validations.

This distribution of validators could be important, with the US Securities and Exchange Commission claiming they have jurisdiction over the entire ethereum network because most of the validators are located in the US.

It might be the majority, but it’s not 51% of all validators, and it’s probably not even the majority per capita, but a US court will probably say the US has jurisdiction, although an independent international court probably will. has not.

The geographic distribution of validators is therefore important for censorship resistance and other reasons, as validators more or less control the network; and so the way to deal with censorship is to run your own validator and not fight the censorship.

In this way, all or almost all the important principles of the network are preserved, such as decentralization and the lack of a decisive word from a man or a group of men.

This text is distributed by TrustNodes.