Mining pools are intermediaries. They turn workshares from GPUs, ASICs or another silicon of choice into hashes for the network. They also have the unique ability to select transactions going into blocks. It's a responsibility future protocol developments like Stratum v2 plan to curb, given the centralized nature of the task.

While transaction censorship has happened on Bitcoin before–notably MARA Pool’s ill fated venture–it's arguably more insidious on Ethereum because of its smart contract functionality. Any contract can be blacklisted, sending all the associated assets down the sink.

Ostensibly, Ethermine and its employees do not want to be associated with a sanction of any sort. Developers are soft targets for overly-ambitious law enforcement. Who wants that?

Here lies the beauty of decentralized compute, though. Ethermine might account for the lion’s share of hashrate on Ethereum, but not enough to stifle transactions. Other miners with different risk profiles will package the transaction regardless. And the network will grind on as always.

P.S. Check out a great podcast we did with Drew Hinkes of New York University on the subject last week.