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added location choice blog post material - #226
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metachris
approved these changes
Aug 10, 2026
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Pull request overview
Adds a new long-form research blog post about geographic “location choice” in multi-concurrent proposer (MCP) designs, and updates the site’s author registry to support the post’s bylines.
Changes:
- Normalize/adjust formatting for several existing entries in
content/authors.ymland add new author records used by the post. - Add a new MDX post: “Why Location Choice Matters” with images, references, and forum link.
Reviewed changes
Copilot reviewed 2 out of 6 changed files in this pull request and generated 4 comments.
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| content/authors.yml | Re-indents several author entries and adds new authors referenced by the new post. |
| content/2026-08-09-why-location-choice-matters.mdx | New MDX article with frontmatter, images, and links describing location choice implications for MCP protocols. |
Suppressed comments (2)
content/authors.yml:181
- Most author titles in this file use the format "@flashbots" (no space). To keep titles consistent and avoid mismatched display/search formatting, update this new entry to match (e.g., see alejo at content/authors.yml:3).
title: Research @ Flashbots
content/authors.yml:191
- Most author titles in this file use the format "@flashbots" (no space). To keep titles consistent and avoid mismatched display/search formatting, update this new entry to match (e.g., see alejo at content/authors.yml:3).
title: Research @ Flashbots
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| boz: | ||
| name: Burak Öz | ||
| title: Research @ Flashbots |
| tags: [decentralization, mcp, block building, research] | ||
| image: /img/location-choice/cover.jpg | ||
| hide_table_of_contents: false | ||
| description: "Covering the Price of Decentralization paper and motivating why location choice matters in the design on multi-proposer mechanisms." |
Comment on lines
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| Thankfully, reality is a little more distributed, both in terms of validator placement and order-flow origins. Hence, there isn’t a total collapse of geography yet. Still, a large share of validators today operate in Europe and North America, and in a recent paper, _[Geographical Centralization Resilience in Ethereum's Block-Building Paradigms | ||
| ](https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21475v3)_, we show how the current block-building architecture of Ethereum (under local block building and PBS-like outsourced block building) incentivizes minimizing latency to payoff-relevant entities and eventually leads to a geographically concentrated system. |
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| The implications of geographical centralization—which are discussed at length by Phil Daian [here](https://collective.flashbots.net/t/decentralized-crypto-needs-you-to-be-a-geographical-decentralization-maxi/1385)—include correlated failures (e.g., due to natural disasters or outages) and asymmetric access to rewards. One can argue that these threats are amplified when the underlying blockchain protocol operates with a single proposer who has a temporary monopoly over block creation. In such networks, geographical concentration may have a direct impact on the liveness of the system (e.g., if the next proposer is unreachable on the network), as well as on censorship resistance, where the proposer may deliberately choose to leave out your transactions or may have to follow governmental regulations preventing the inclusion of certain transactions, as happened with OFAC sanctions on privacy-mixer transactions. | ||
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| The introduction of multiple concurrent proposer (MCP) systems promotes a remedy to this, where a block’s contents can be provided by multiple entities in the same round. In an ideal world, this would provide a significant improvement over the single-proposer bottleneck on censorship resistance. The idea is simple: if there are $N$ proposers in any given round, even if $N-1$ are censoring you, it is sufficient to have one non-censoring proposer who would include your transaction, assuming you pay an adequate fee. Yet, there is a catch: if proposers are geographically concentrated in a region far away from you, latency effects may undo the benefits, reducing your chance of timely inclusion. Although this may not be a big issue for simple payments, for time-sensitive transactions (e.g., in MEV competition settings), you may be left out of because your transaction did not reach at least one of the $N$ proposers on time. |
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