Vitalik Buterin speaks out against possible censorship of Ethereum protocol

He noted that PoS has a softfork feature that can be activated by a minority of users in the form of “social consensus”

16.08.2022 - 16:10

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2 min

What’s new? Blogger Eric Wall conducted a poll about possible censorship of the Ethereum protocol. The poll offered 2 choices: X — consider the censorship an attack on Ethereum and burn the share of validators who would support the sanctions; Y — tolerate the censorship. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin voted to burn the share of validators if they would block transactions at the protocol level, agreeing with the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) censorship. This option was also supported by 62% of respondents.

Question for the Ethereum community. If a majority of stake chooses A in this poll, will you:X) Consider the censorship an attack on Ethereum and burn their stake via social consensusY) Tolerate the censorship https://t.co/Mf48co37jK— Eric Wall X 🏴 (@ercwl) August 15, 2022

What is the point of the poll? It was created as a response to a poll by Rotkiapp protocol founder Lefteris Karapetsas for major staking pools such as Kraken, Lido Finance, and Coinbase on whether they would comply with regulators. In that survey, 66% of respondents expressed a willingness to adhere to government agency requirements. Wall, in turn, asked what to do with those who would support OFAC sanctions compliance.

What does Buterin say? Vitalik Buterin noted that the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm has a softfork feature that can be activated by a minority of users in the form of “social consensus.” This requires the consent of the holders of a third of the locked funds in staking. In Ethereum, this is implemented through a penalty mechanism for inactivity leak mechanism.

Earlier, Buterin said that the crypto market had not yet taken into account in the price of ETH the upcoming upgrade, as a result of which the network algorithm would switch from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to PoS. The developer believes that the growth of the coin may not happen immediately, but “under the right set of conditions” it can be expected in 6-8 months after the upgrade.

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