It's a huge ASIC investment to acquire 51% of the hashpower. Billions of dollars are required, maybe trillions in the future.
They don't have to acquire anything. Just force pool operators to obey their blacklists, and count on enough individual miners not caring enough to switch to a different pool. F2Pool started censoring transactions based on the US government OFAC blacklist, despite there being exactly zero laws requiring them to do so and despite them not even being based in the US.
Everybody who cheered for the Blackrock ETF should rethink their actions imo.
This forum is full of people who welcome ETFs, welcome institutions, and welcome more regulations, all because it will make the price go up. And if the bitcoin forum founded by Satoshi is largely happy to sacrifice everything bitcoin was designed for in order to chase some short term fiat gains, then you can damn sure the average Joe isn't going care.