Hm. I believe that crypto will enable new power structures that can challenge how societies are organised. Based on what you said, I feel like the PoS community might be aiming too low?
My fundamental argument about security stands and it does imply that economies of scale matter. It’s a hard truth and implies that building up a challenge to the way the world works takes a lot of effort and won’t be done from your mother’s closet. Worse - if the good people of the earth don’t take up the challenge, are they going to be able to stand up when challenged?
Flashbots relay has a complete dominance of MEV-Boost block building. At this time they relay over 80% of built blocks. If you see the linked site you can see that they routinely have blocks with higher value, so they keep getting chosen by proposers. This is, in good part, because Flashbots (unlike all other relays) does not take a fee. So we ended up with a non-profit relay that is actively censoring.
The vast majority of proposers seem to only care about maximizing their profits. They just pick the block with the highest bid and don’t care if the block is OFAC-compliant or not. Actually, comparing the blocks relayed by the different BloXroute relays, you can see that the vast majority just chose the max profit relay. I’d say that it’s short-sighted, but it’s debatable.
The Merge didn’t really play a part here, MEV-Boost and Flashbots did. The proposers do not want to censor, they are just maximizing their profits. The problem is that Flashbots is basically subsidizing the production of censored blocks.
And as expected, censorship is steadily going down as new relays steal market share from Flashbots. It will never go to zero, but will hopefully stabilize at below 33%.