[rglullis]

> 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".

[astrange]

> 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.

[rglullis]

Please enlighten me: how can the US government stop a transaction from happening in a blockchain network?

[astrange]

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...

[rglullis]

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.

[astrange]

That’s a theoretical argument; in real life it doesn’t matter what happens in a single transaction right now. All those services are operated and used by real people, if they’re legal now it’s because they’re complying with laws, and if they stop complying with laws they won’t be legal.

Assuming you expect to still be alive in the next few years, it’s not a good idea to pretend like you don’t have to care about this. You can end up in front of a judge if you do something illegal, and they aren’t impressed with “you can’t stop me” as an argument. They can find someone who can do something and they can order them to do that.

[rglullis]

You are still missing the point.

> if they’re legal now it’s because they’re complying with laws, and if they stop complying with laws they won’t be legal.

Laws from what country?

OP's comment was trying to argue that "the country of jurisdiction has veto power". My question was "which country has jurisdiction over a distributed application running in thousands of independent computers spread around the world?"

It's not about the individuals, what I am arguing is that the service itself can not be stopped. A government could try to stop its citizens from using the service but even if they were successful (good luck with that...) the service itself would still be around.

Contrast that with, e.g, The Pirate Bay. To stop the service, Governments could and did manage to go after the individuals, or the hosting providers and even the DNS registrars. These were all the choke points that the governments tried to use, because these are points where they can have some jurisdiction. But no government can order an ENS domain to be suspended. No court can stop an IPFS hash to being a representation of a file, and while one could get an order for a specific server to be disconnected, there is no way to issue an order to delete all files of a given hash from the network. There is no one who can remove a contract that is deployed on a blockchain, so there is no way that a judge "can find someone to do something about it..."

And no, this is not a "theoretical argument". It is a very real one. The main reason so many developers are attracted to "web3" is because of its "permissionless" nature. If dapps were not censorship-resistant, then of course developers would just stick with what is more efficient, cheaper and well-established.