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by rglullis 1464 days ago
Way to miss the point. ENS being "privately owned" or "having a constitution" only really matters if you care about participating in the governance - which I will admit is silly - or if you want to have have some influence in further developments. But as an user, none of this matters. You can claim an id and no government or "owner" will take it from you. No registrar will give names to squatters to put in marketplaces. Actual ownership is public and transparent. Prices are reasonable. You can now have completely censorship-resistant sites by tying a ENS address with an IPFS page.

ENS is already super useful if you care about owning your identities without worrying about intermediaries.
1 comments
duskwuff 1464 days ago
> But as an user, none of this matters. You can claim an id and no government or "owner" will take it from you...

I don't think this is even true.

For one, the service has a public governance process, and it is almost certainly the case that a proposal could be passed through that process which seized ownership of a "domain".

Second, any actual government that this service is operating under the jurisdiction of has the ultimate veto power -- they can order it to take action under the threat of legal charges against their company's principals, or the seizure of their infrastructure. You may see this as a problem, but it isn't a problem which can be solved by software.

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rglullis 1464 days ago
> passed through that process which seized ownership of a "domain".

No, this is not how it works. To be able to do that, they would have to rewrite the smart contract with the specific rules to revoke ownership, "upgrade" the contract (which I am not even sure if it is something supported by ENS current protocol) and then they would have to convince everyone else (or the significant majority of users) to migrate to the new contract as well.

> any actual government that this service is operating under the jurisdiction

What is the jurisdiction of "the internet"? There isn't one. There isn't a company behind this, there is no ZIP code, and so on. You can not stop tens of thousands of people running ethereum nodes all around the world. You might try to stop the current developers from doing further work, but the contract that is already deployed on the blockchain can not simply be removed. It is physically impossible to do it. That is the meaning of "censorship-resistant".

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astrange 1464 days ago
> What is the jurisdiction of "the internet"? There isn't one.

It’s the US, except for when it’s China or Russia.

You may feel you aren’t under their jurisdiction. It turns out it doesn’t matter what you think though, much like if an elephant is charging at you, your opinion of the situation doesn’t really have an effect.

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rglullis 1464 days ago
Please enlighten me: how can the US government stop a transaction from happening in a blockchain network?
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astrange 1464 days ago
US controls all financial infrastructure everywhere. You can’t buy coins if you can’t use the onramps (due to KYC), can’t use the off-ramps (due to Chainalysis and exchange KYC noticing your coins came from a wallet used for crimes a year or two ago). They can extradite you and just wait for you to give up your keys. And so on.

You can’t get away by just not being interesting right now. Transactions are public and forever on most blockchains, so anyone can find you at any time in the future.

These people tried but they barely got to spend their winnings due to how hard it really is to launder money.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-arrested-alleged-conspira...

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rglullis 1464 days ago
I am not asking about the finance side of things, and I am not asking as someone who is trying to do anything illegal.

The question was "how the US government can stop people from making a transaction on the blockchain?" More specifically: what government who would have the capacity to stop people from using a dapp?

Can the US government stop people from getting their (completely KYC'd) crypto and exchanging on Uniswap? Can it stop them from making a Tornado Cash transfer? Can it stop them from buying a domain name on ENS?

The answer, of course, is no, they can not. Your talk about government reach is just unrelated bullshit.

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