Block building has been known to be centralized by PBS since I raised it in this series of posts.
I think you mean block production. As the linked document makes clear, and as Flashbots and others have continually maintained, PBS is meant to protect validator decentralization.
But as I’m now showing PBS also worsens this in some very probable cases.
Ah but that’s just it. There is something we can do. Instead of maximizing MEV we can minimize it with base layer TE (or similar). Where MEV was an oversight before, with PBS it is now a choice.
We will need to justify to the users that are suffering frontrunning attacks and the regulators and law makers authoring legislation why we have chosen to maximize MEV when we could be minimizing it.
Who cares whether frontrunning is permissionless or not. It’s frontrunning! Shouldn’t be happening at all.
Look at zeromev.org before Flashbots in Feb 2011 and you’ll see we’re just as capable of auditing MEV before mev-geth as after.
In fact, PBS reduces auditability because it forces users to go direct to builders and bypass the decentralized mempool (which has not been protected by encryption).