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It is commonly written everywhere that Ethereum miner selects transaction based on higher gas price first, so I want to know is it possible for minter to select transaction to process based on from/to address instead of higher price ?

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Simple answer is yes. The miner can select whichever transactions from the pool they like. They can include all of them, none of them, or any combination they want based on any criteria - including the from address, or the contracts being called, or even the outcome of the contract call. Of course, they won't get paid for transactions they don't include, and they can't prevent a transaction ever getting mined, as there are other miners that will include it themselves in a later block.

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  • Thanks for answer. can you please specify how to do this specifically? Any resources or links to docs? Thanks again.
    – Yogesh - EtherAuthority.io
    Commented May 22, 2020 at 5:17
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    Sorry - just to check - you want to be an Ethereum miner that selectively censors transactions?
    – Zakalwe
    Commented May 22, 2020 at 6:57
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    OK. So you can do this, but on Mainnet it seems almost entirely pointless. Unless you have enormous hashpower, the likelihood of you mining an individual block in any reasonable timeframe is extremely unlikely. As soon as you put a transaction into the pool, another miner will pick it up. and if you don't - and only want to mine it yourself, it will take you weeks, months or even years to get it mined. Plus you can't really acheive anything by doing this.
    – Zakalwe
    Commented May 26, 2020 at 10:43
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    you can "censor" transactions - but that's no use if you actually want them to get mined. So the only other think you can do is play with the block hash. which, again, is going to be a fruitless exercise unless you have a significant %age of the overall hashrate
    – Zakalwe
    Commented May 26, 2020 at 10:44
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    well, in order to censor a transaction for, on average, one additional block, you'd need 50% of the total hashpower (current hashpower is about 180,000 GH/s). Randomly searching on the internet, this would cost you about $134,000 per hour. To reduce it to, on average 100 additional blocks, you'd need about 100x this, ie $13 million dollars per hour. By this point you'd have long broken Ethereum. To totally censor a transaction, you'd need to find every ethereum node and physically shut them down. This might be difficult...
    – Zakalwe
    Commented Jun 4, 2020 at 11:32

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