[rtpg]

A judge! A judge can just claim jursidiction!

Imagine if Goldman Sachs did this. A judge can say "look, you can follow our rules or we start seizing assets etc".

And when you're sitting around trying to be anonymous, well... you're doing everything on a public ledger, so now you're extremely restricted.

Hell, courts/legislative bodies could even go down the "force all miners within their jurisdiction to rollback an unwanted transaction". You think miners care enough to make a stand on this kind of stuff?

Unless you're going to like.... download your consciousness onto the blockchain you are still just as liable to being told by a court what to do as anything else.

[stjohnswarts]

Well if you don't know who the person who got the money is then there's not much a judge can do.

[crooked-v]

Judges have tremendous amounts of discretionary power when carrying out the law, and a good judge certainly isn't going to just give up because the identity of one party isn't immediately known. The example already given of ordering that the transaction be reversed on the network (even if that involves compelling uninvolved people to cooperate with the process) is entirely plausible.

[arilotter]

Are judges going to manage to identify and compel enough miners (or devs, i guess, assuming the miners adopt the compelled transaction revert version) to have enough hash power to win a fork?

[rtpg]

this could easily be combined with legislation providing tools to make it harder and harder to participate in mining off-fork.

US financial laws have been very useful for the gov't to be able to de facto give it worldwide jurisdiction in some areas, I think there would be relatively few qualms about continuing down this path. Especially if (for example) Robinhood and Coinbase were forced to follow along. At one point the "blessed" thing will become the only place you can really operate.

[stickfigure]

This would require an incredible amount of international cooperation. It might be possible, but I doubt it likely.

[pornel]

For example, the court could declare that this transaction was illegal, and anything spent from it is also illegal forever. The ledger is open, so courts can compel exchanges to watch for such transactions and report anyone that can spend coins derived from them (exchanges have already been forced to comply with KYC).

This would destroy the real-world value of this block, basically making it a digital equivalent of dirty money.