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You mean the miners? Mining Ethereum doesn’t allow for much inspection of what you’re validating in each block. It’s just a program that runs and guesses a bun

You mean the miners? Mining Ethereum doesn’t allow for much inspection of what you’re validating in each block. It’s just a program that runs and guesses a bunch of salts that hopefully result in a hash that meets some particular parameters (e.g. starts with 5 zeros). You want to be the first to guess correctly so you win the reward for that block, so any sort of investigation doesn’t make sense. From what data was stored on-chain in that block and whether it may be problematic (or even what the data represents), to which contracts were involved (and whether they have criminal ties), it’s just not reasonable for any miner to take responsibility for the block chain operating as expected. I think this is the core issue with the block chain, is that society has always expected there to be some moral agent that you could hold responsible. Except in cases of natural disasters, you can normally blame someone. But with blockchains, it’s a lot harder to place blame on someone, or link a physical person to the online identity. Similarly with the 2008 GFC, everything was abstract enough that almost nobody got in trouble for a situation that was most certainly man-made, but hard to place the blame. At least then, though, the government had some amount of control over the banks and also relied on them to return society to normal. Through the government’s eyes, block chain doesn’t appear necessary for society to operate and is very difficult to regulate, so I’m sure their tolerance is a lot lower for blockchains when financial crimes crop up from it.

legutierr 4y ago
> Mining Ethereum doesn’t allow for much inspection of what you’re validating in each block. Yes and no. It depends on what you mean by “validating”. If your objective is to restrict the types of transactions that end up in the blocks you yourself create, you can recompile geth with a custom mempool implementation, and use that custom mempool to inspect the data of any pending transaction you want. This is how MEV works. In other words, it is 100% possible for a technically-competent miner to only create new blocks that exclude blacklisted accounts, or that restrict transactions according to any number of criteria. On the other hand, once a new block has already been mined and propagated to the network, there is nothing that a single miner can do to stop it. If you start rejecting otherwise-valid blocks because they include blacklisted transactions, you will only fork yourself from the network. The rest of the miners will keep on building on top of the block you wanted to drop.

legutierr 4y ago

> Mining Ethereum doesn’t allow for much inspection of what you’re validating in each block. Yes and no. It depends on what you mean by “validating”. If your objective is to restrict the types of transactions that end up in the blocks you yourself create, you can recompile geth with a custom mempool implementation, and use that custom mempool to inspect the data of any pending transaction you want. This is how MEV works. In other words, it is 100% possible for a technically-competent miner to only create new blocks that exclude blacklisted accounts, or that restrict transactions according to any number of criteria. On the other hand, once a new block has already been mined and propagated to the network, there is nothing that a single miner can do to stop it. If you start rejecting otherwise-valid blocks because they include blacklisted transactions, you will only fork yourself from the network. The rest of the miners will keep on building on top of the block you wanted to drop.