A contribution to the critique of blockchain censorship
Ruichao Jiang, Michelle Yeo, Long Wen
Abstract
We study the blockchain censorship attack introduced in [21], which shows that joining the attack is a dominant strategy. We show that, by introducing certain detectability threshold, joining the attack can lead to strictly less reward for whales, which are defined to be a small number of validators that hold significantly more voting power than the rest (henceforth known as minnows). This leads to a change of the equilibrium: With whales unwilling to participate in the attack, it is difficult for minnows alone to launch the attack. We also perform Monte Carlo simulation to show the existence of reduction for whales' reward in Ethereum and Solana.
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