The Problem: Miners Can Censor Transactions

Right now, any Monero miner (or mining pool) can look at the pool of pending transactions (the mempool) and decide which ones to include in the next block they mine. If a miner has a reason to censor a specific transaction—perhaps for political reasons, or because they're being paid to block a competitor—they can simply choose not to include it. This is a potential vulnerability for any Proof-of-Work blockchain.

The Proposed Solution: A "Black Box" for Building Blocks ⛓️

The proposal suggests using a TEE to fix this.

    What is a TEE? Think of a TEE as a secure, tamper-proof vault inside a computer's main processor (like Intel SGX or AMD SEV). Code and data inside the TEE are isolated from the rest of the system. Even the owner of the computer can't see what's happening inside it. It's a "black box."

    How would it work?

        Encrypted Transaction Pool: Instead of broadcasting transactions to a public mempool, users would send their transactions through an encrypted "tunnel" directly to a TEE run by a block producer.

        Secret Operations: Inside the TEE, the transaction is decrypted and added to a secret, encrypted mempool. The miner operating the TEE cannot see the individual transactions inside.

        Fair Block Building: The program running inside the TEE automatically builds a block using the transactions from its secret pool, following fair rules (e.g., highest fee first). It cannot be told to exclude a specific transaction.

        Proof of Fairness (Attestation): When the TEE outputs a finished block template for the miner to solve, it also provides a cryptographic proof, called an attestation. This proves to the network that the TEE was running the correct, unaltered software and followed the rules fairly.

Essentially, the TEE acts as a blind, impartial middleman that forces miners to be honest. To censor a transaction, an attacker would need to break the hardware-level security of the TEE, which is significantly harder than just running custom mining software.