It's a lot easier and more fruitful to get on a spaces or other format to discuss, rather than write a novel here that maybe 3 people might read and we end up talking past each other and missing points... So I'll just reply once and any time you want to discuss I'll do so. In short, some high level comments: Your hypothetical scenario only covers censorship by miners chasing profit and completely ignores the actual real threat we need to "decentralize" against - the State. The incentives already punish profit-seeking miners who censor Txs or censor competing blocks. Pools / miners who censor Txs get paid less (compare Oceans fee revenue with Mara, for example), and self select by Darwin-ing themselves off the network via bankruptcy. Pools that censor entire blocks (do not build on competing valid blocks) risk losing the block race but also risk losing most of their user's, who may or may not continue with the pool given there's is an implicit expectation to act in good faith of the network with the hash they are entrusted with. Miners who control enough hash directly to censor other miners and ignore their blocks - they do not need a pool anyway, and Foundry or Ocean would both be at the majority hash's mercy and have no choice but to mine on top of the majority's blocks, or shut off to conserve energy. The network of merchants using bitcoin may not even care in this scenario because in this scenario only blocks are getting censored, there is no Tx censorship, users may or may not care about relatively slower blocks and higher fee congestion. Regarding the *real* threat that is of actual concern, which you completely ignore here, the State will punish Ocean, or any pool they can identify for that matter, who serves miners stratum work if the pool collectively does not comply with the State's mandate. *Especially* if the pool is profiting off their client's block templates, as Ocean is by charging their clients pooling fees. The State does not care that Ocean's codebase allows a user to select the template, just as they don't care if you were unaware that you operated a server that served your client State secrets for profit. They will shut you down regardless. Ocean is a white market business and will comply to the letter of the law, or their directors will go to jail. Like most pool servers, Ocean likely also logs IPs and has other info on the hashers connected to it, which is also not ideal and definitely not "decentralizing". People confuse my criticism for being specific to Ocean, I've been consistently criticizing the client-side block templates ever since the day Matt Carallo proposed it with BetterHash a half decade ago. In terms of your hypothetical specifically. Nobody can stop a majority miner from 51% the network of they choose to. If you are saying that Foundry as the operator leverages and aggregates its users' hash to attack the network, that would probably breach the confidence of those miners and they would likely leave Foundry. Yes it would take some time for Foundry's clients to realize it, but they would shift and the censorship by Foundry would stop, with a tarnished reputation. Despite this, 51% attack are ***valid*** behavior and something that is secured against via market ***incentives*** and contemplated by the economic security model - it is market driven, not ideal driven. Also, pool clients might NOT leave and stay with Foundry if the market is not signalling for them to leave (crashing price for example). You can only expect miners to do what is maximally profitable for themselves alone. Any pool that has enough hashpower to censor the network, such as 80% as you suggest, risk losing their entire business by abusing their client's hash. That cost is likely far higher than the short term gains they may earn monopolizing the blocks, which is the only actual profit path for the 51% hash power. A pool can try, at their peril.