Yeah, I wasn't saying you were incorrect, your answer just didn't dig much deeper than "miners do whatever they like, validators check it". The matter of centra

Yeah, I wasn't saying you were incorrect, your answer just didn't dig much deeper than "miners do whatever they like, validators check it". The matter of centralisation is answered by what miners can get away with, not the mere fact that validators exist. You must examine this because miners are the ones that are subject to centralisation through efficiencies of scale at buying electricity and computing power. So attacks are possible that are plausibly deniable as accidents, software glitches, dropped packets, etc., but in fact involve coordination by majority miners. And further, MEV is a problem even if you ignore % of hash rate and centralisation of the mining market -- any single miner will exploit any opportunity you give them if they can, especially the undetectable/unprovable ones. So much of MEV is not a matter of adversarial voting but literally 100% of miners are incentivised to do it, independently and unanimously. It's just a matter of who figures out how to extract it, who has relevant conflicts of interest, or who has enough cash to snap up opportunities that arise. That's less about centralisation though. And the scope of this discussion was never just bitcoin. TrailOfBits' paper is about the technology generally.