There is a valid argument to be made that the ultimate test of Ethereum PoS will come down to the simple question if the market will price the OFAC-fork higher than the permissionless fork …especially if most stables/asset-backed tokens can only be redeemed on the OFAC-fork

”We will just slash the stake belonging to the censoring attacker” (as per Vitalik’s words) => in an OFAC-situation where the censoring stake are businesses trying to not go to jail it will likely lead to a fork. ETC vs ETH scenario.

A chain relying on trusted oracles and asset-backed offchain assets clearly plays to a disadvantage of the permissionless defenders, unfortunately. The permissionless defenders will have massive liquidations, L2s requiring mass exit, many tokens dropping to 0 to deal with.

The ”hope” is that people would know better than to spend a penny on buying the OFAC-compliant fork, knowing that state-controlled crypto is an oxymoron worth 0. But I am not sure that’s how the market will see it. Many would probably even disagree.

If the OFAC-fork is just called ”ETH” on exchanges, it absolutely won’t be priced at $0.

Anyway, so the real reason Ethereum PoS might be easier to control than Bitcoin doesn’t even have anything to do with PoS, it is DeFi that has a lot more external dependencies that creates most of the attack surface I’m describing.

Either way, this is one of the reasons that it is important to let bitcoin be bitcoin, and why bitcoin will continue to play a massive role in the overall crypto story. ”Dependency-free” bitcoin is probably a narrative bitcoin should play harder.

Note: OFAC-blacklists also don’t have to exist in e.g. Geth to work, it can be the default in the block building and still do damage. People would have to run custom software and solo-mine blocks including blacklisted transactions for it to become a validator&stake-level issue.