[GBiT]

From legal standpoint it is interesting case and it can bring precedent to crypto scene. We will know if person can lose coins and retrieve them back lawful way with court order. Even more interesting, that most miners are now located in USA jurisdiction.

We know, that Google and others can adjust results based on courts orders. It's interesting if miners who invested hundred millions into mining operation could follow order and implement changes to mining software.

It its a known secret, that right now, major miners do some changes and implementations, like for example blacklisting/watching big cold wallets of major exchanges for coins to be secure and not stolen by mistake.

[rrobukef]

Hell, it can bring precedent to OSS licenses. Bitcoin is MIT licensed : '[...] THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, [...]'. If you, as a creator, can hold co-authors responsible for losses.

[nullc]

FWIW, in this legal action Wright expressly states that his claims of being Bitcoin's creator are irrelevant for the case.

His claimed cause of action is that as a user he negligently handled his bitcoins and lost them to hackers, and that the some random subset of the authors (e.g. the ones best able to debunk his claims of being Bitcoin's creator) owe him a fiduciary duty to make him whole.

[emteycz]

This makes no sense to me. The court orders... who exactly, to return the coins? AFAIK a new Bitcoin fork would have to be made (by whom?) - and there's no guarantee the fork would be accepted by anyone.

[pczy]

Even being non-American with my necessarily flawed understanding of the US constitution, the scenario you described strikes me as a clear violation of the first amendment. First, you would have to compel someone to write new code that changes the way bitcoin fundamentally works. Assuming you manage to do so, you would then have to compel "everyone" to recognise the hard-fork as the "true" chain, again something clearly at odds with the first amendment, and I suspect the laws in many other jurisdictions as well (for obvious reasons).

[jcranmer]

It wouldn't violate the First Amendment, since the court isn't going to be a government actor for that purpose. A court absolutely could order someone to change their code to comport with the judgement--I mean, this happened to Apple in the not-too-distant past. What the court can't do is compel everybody to use the new hard fork, first for the simple reason that most of those people aren't being sued, but somewhat more fundamentally for the reason that it doesn't really remedy any judicially-cognizable harm. (That said, it's similarly hard to envision a scenario where the court orders someone to modify Bitcoin's code, especially if you're talking about something that retroactively adjusts balances).

[GBiT]

Miners investing hundred millions dollars into operation. If court will tell them, like for example 3 biggest miners from US to make that block, they will do it to protect investment, because other way they will get sanctions from gov. Other people on non-mining nodes can fork it, but noone with millions dollars at stake will be on forked chain and only miners make blocks. Court will not be stupid and believe, that such move is legal way to disobey court.

[nullc]

That isn't how Bitcoin works. Miners can't violate the protocol, since the protocol decides what is and isn't mining.

Wright wants a version of Bitcoin created with a backdoor to transaction authentication that lets him take coins without presenting the required credentials. If he created such a version and convinced some miners to run it, they'd simply stop producing blocks (at least from the perspective of anyone who didn't also adopt his backdoor).

So the situation you imagine would just result in hashrate going down-- which can be a bit of an an annoyance since it slows down transaction settlement temporarily, but isn't a dire issue (e.g. Bitcoin lost on the order of half its hash power for a while after china issued a ban).

In any case, if Wright shared your theory and was acting in good faith the target of his actions would be miners and not volunteer open source developers. He's stated outright in public that he expects the ruinous cost of his litigation to destroy the lives of his targets.

[GBiT]

We will see how courts will decide. Right now it's just a presumptions on how things can roll out.

[nullc]

What is a presumption? The targets and content of Wright's lawsuit are not presumptions.

The nature of Bitcoin's operation is not a presumption-- the code is open and anyone is free to go look at how it works.

[nullc]

In the apple case you're referring to the government dropped its case after Apple argued that the government's demand constituted unconstitutional compelled speech.

In the united states the courts only have power at the pleasure of the constitution, the constitution is binding on all actions of a court. (Now, the courts could conclude some action doesn't violate the constitution-- but that's a different matter)

Except in some narrow cases in civil matters US courts do not order specific performance -- they don't order you to perform some specific act -- instead, the award cash damages for the harm you caused the other party.

In the ninth circuit where I reside, the standing, unchallenged, and unambiguous law that the publication of source code is speech protected by the first amending as was established in Bernstein v. US.

This is also recognized by the long line of modern decisions with respect to defamation law-- it cannot be so overpowered that it abridges the publics free speech rights, even though defamation is always a civil matter.

If you adopt an interpretation that the remedies available to the courts aren't constrained by the constitution, then any imaginable abrogation of the civil rights of the public could be lawfully imposed by simply creating a civil cause of action with the otherwise unconstitutional action as a remedy, then the state can induce some private actor to take action under the law. (The idea that Wright is acting on behalf of some state actor out to undermine Bitcoin is a common conspiracy theory, but a less parsimonious explanation than him being a simple con-artist.)

You're absolutely right that Wright's demand would also require that everyone adopt the alternative version and regard it as Bitcoin--- which is akin to expecting everyone to start believing he's a good guy, something no conceivable court could order because no court can never have power over the hearts of mankind (short of someone inventing a mind control gun :P ). It also has the practical problem that many of the defendants, such as myself, haven't been Bitcoin developers for years. And defendants, even the active ones, have no more ability to take action here that Wright himself does-- it's open source software, after all--, except for the fact that the defendants have a good reputation and Wright has a reputation as a fraud.

But to even get that far wright would also need to overcome the civil rights problems with his request-- at least for the US defendants: Wright is asking the government to compel labor to author the backdoored itself, compel speech by making the defendants publish it, and restrain their speech by prohibiting them from publishing non-backdoored code. He also would have to overcome the fact that the license they offered the software under expressly requires the recipient wave liability for any cause in connection with the software. (and the fact that his claimed loss is pretty obviously nonsense)

He also has to overcome a number of procedural issues, including the fact that the lawsuit was brought in the UK by an insolvent foreign shell corporation itself owned by a web of other insolvent shell companies in different jurisdictions -- none of whom operate in the UK against developers none of whom do business in the UK. Wright prefers the UK because of its motion-by-motion loser-pays default that lets Wright extract enormous legal fees by defeating summary judgement motions by offering forgeries (summary judgements are decided by assuming the facts are in the favor of the non-movant), as well as the weak protection for people's free speech rights. Wright's hail mary to try to keep in in the jurisdiction of the UK courts is to include one of his own entities as a defendant, and of course they immediately agreed to the jurisdiction.

[jimmydorry]

This kind of thing happens all the time under the guise of national security.