Ethereum's ideals of decentralization and censorship resistance are undermined in practice, motivating ongoing efforts to reestablish these properties. Existing proposals for fairness mechanisms depend on the assumption that a sufficient fraction of block proposers adhere to Ethereum's protocols as intended. We refer to such proposers as altruistic, as this behavior may come at the cost of reduced revenue. Prior analyses indicate that a consistent share of 91 percent of proposers delegate block construction to centralized services, effectively signing externally constructed blocks blindly, and are thus not considered altruistic. To assess whether the remaining 9 percent of proposers genuinely exhibit altruistic behavior, we conducted an empirical analysis and found that an additional 6.1 percent also interact with such external services. Further, we found that less than 1.4 percent of proposers consistently acted in accordance with Ethereum's decentralization and censorship resistance objectives. These findings suggest that relying solely on the mere presence of altruistic proposers is insufficient to ensure that proposed fairness mechanisms reestablish Ethereum's ideals, highlighting the need for additional incentive- or penalty-based mechanisms.

翻译：以太坊的去中心化和抗审查理想在实践中受到削弱，这促使人们持续努力重建这些特性。现有的公平机制提案依赖于一个假设：足够比例的区块提议者会按照预期遵守以太坊协议。我们将此类提议者称为利他主义者，因为这种行为可能以降低收益为代价。先前分析表明，持续有91%的提议者将区块构建委托给中心化服务，实际上是在盲目签署外部构建的区块，因此不被视为利他主义者。为评估剩余9%的提议者是否真正表现出利他行为，我们进行了实证分析，发现另有6.1%的提议者也与这类外部服务存在交互。此外，我们发现仅有不足1.4%的提议者始终遵循以太坊的去中心化与抗审查目标行事。这些发现表明，仅依赖利他主义提议者的存在不足以确保所提出的公平机制能重建以太坊的理想特性，这凸显了需要引入基于激励或惩罚的附加机制。