Censoring Transactions at the Protocol Layer

Ethereum Needs a Censorship Lever Let me be the bearer of bad news. Cut off my head if you like. But for Ethereum to fully aspire to its dreams, it needs to have a way to check itself. It’s along the lines of ‘With great power… blah blah blah’ The ugly truth that no one wants to talk about, so I’m going to, is censorship. At the Protocol Layer. If Ethereum has *zero* way of censoring, it only takes *one* dickhead to write a smart contract that will pay out a shit ton of money if the President of some country dies. Or whatever other variant. It hasn’t been done yet, but *someone*, sooner or later, will do it. And I’m here to un-stick all our heads out of the sand. There is a path forward. First, assume that governance over the Ethereum protocol is solved. That’s another infinite topic. But say it was. Then, we *could* implement censorship rules, at the Protocol Layer, for certain instances, such as the one I gave previously. Again, assuming the governance part is solved. I’m not asking you to trust me; I’m pointing out that these are independent research areas that can be done in parallel. Whatever the governance side decides, it’ll come through as a single pass/fail, whether that side is decentralized or not. And for the censorship side, it doesn’t need to worry about any of that, it just needs to know that a decision was made to censor a certain address. It makes sense to do the research on what this would look like, at the Protocol Layer. Because it’s good to be prepared, not just for bad news, but also for good news. I think this is an unexplored research area because it has been taboo. I’m breaking the taboo. Here and now. We need to research this. Because we can’t have some jackass deploying a smart contract where anyone can donate a penny and when it hits a million pennies, some drone somewhere will go fly and explode into the white house. Yea, that’s right. If Ethereum starts to become mass adopted, it won’t take long for someone to think of it. So please start researching how censorship should actually work in a realistic world scenario, assuming governance side is decentralized. It’s very much worth it to start that today. Thank you 1 post - 1 participant Read full topic