# Censorship Resistance

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According to MW, more than 60% of blocks are OFAC compliant. They will avoid the TC txs and any txs that OFAC has banned

Does this mean that Ethereum is being censored, will the neutrality and decentralization of Ethereum be gone, and will Ethereum become a "US chain"?



These are issues of great concern to the Ethereum community and it is easy to mislead the community

## What is "censorship"

When we talk about "censorship", we seem to be talking about some mysterious power spying on us

But it's not true. "Censorship" can be clearly defined and solved through technical means. It's not that mysterious and powerful

Let's define censorship, so-called "censorship" actually has two types👇

- Weak censorship
The transaction will eventually be included on chain, but with a delay (current situation)
- Strong censorship
Transactions will never be included on chain

## Solutions

Ethereum has solutions for both types of censorship

### Solutions for weak censorship

There are already many potential solutions for weak censorship, at least in the research stage. Very promising to completely (100%) eliminate weak censorship on the Ethereum network in the future

At present, a block needs to go through the four processes of searcher-builder-relay-proposer

Each process has a corresponding design to avoid weak censorship


It is worth noting that there are Some very powerful weapons

- Encrypted mempool: Encrypt off-chain transactions and decrypt them when on-chain. You can't censor without transaction type
- Inclusion Lists: We can make a list of all censored transactions and require them have to be included on-chain
- native PBS: The current weak censorship is mainly brought by the flashbot-relay, after the implementation of native PBS, this will not be a problem
- MEV Smoothing: With good pricing, all transactions can be packaged

### Solutions for strong censorship

For strong censorship, the transaction will never be on-chain. It has a catastrophic effect, if your withdrawal transaction never gets on the chain, means you lose the money forever

For Ethereum, the last eight years of research. PoW to PoS is actually solving this problem

According to this website (https://crypto51.app), a 51% attack (Strong censorship) on the Bitcoin network costs only $90w. After the attack, I can take over Bitcoin and repeat the attack again and again until the network goes down


PoS is relatively undervalued. The current attack on Ethereum requires more than 2/3 of staking (the first attack will cost billions of dollars)

attack cost = 14631873 * 2/3 * 1600$ = 15.59B


After the first attack, Ethereum will initiate a hard fork (social layer)

The second attack requires re-purchasing ETH, which will consume the attacker’s hundreds of millions of dollars


## Conclusions

For weak censorship, the transaction will be on-chain but with a delay. Bitcoin is more censorship resistant than Ethereum

For strong censorship, the transaction will never be on-chain. Ethereum is more censorship resistant than Bitcoin

We have a censorship resistance mechanism to prevent both types of censorship. And Ethereum will continue to be credible neutrality and will not become any national chain (e.g. US chain)

At present, strong censorship already has a sufficient defense mechanism, so it is almost impossible to occur. There is some research on weak censorship, hopefully fully resolved this issue in the future

[Thread](https://twitter.com/LuozhuZhang/status/1587410911676858369?s=20&t=hf32T6kwnUQiTjAV1MfiLA)