| 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. |
The US.
> 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?"
The US. No, it doesn't matter where you live, it's the US. As Bandit Keith says, every country in this world belongs to America. (Except for a few like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.)
> It's not about the individuals, what I am arguing is that the service itself can not be stopped.
It can continue, but this is a Pyrrhic victory, ie there's no way this could work out in the real world that anyone would be happy about.
Imagine if someone puts child porn in your immutable distributed database. Is anyone getting away with it merely because it can't be deleted? No, now the service is illegal for everyone, forever.
More mild real example is crypto exchanges banning coins that were transferred out of a coin mixer in the last few transactions. Which is something they have done, and will do more of:
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0768
> 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..."
But they can! Judges are more powerful than you and more powerful than computers. The mere fact that you can't technically fulfill the order makes everything /worse/. Whoever they find is in contempt until they find some way out of doing something impossible; better to have had admin capabilities in the first place.
Tornado Cash seems to have the ability to do something though: https://www.cryptonewsz.com/lazarus-gets-banned-by-tornado-c...
> The main reason so many developers are attracted to "web3" is because of its "permissionless" nature.
Well, or because a16z is giving them money to do it. I don't agree that not getting prosecuted is proof it's fine; you need to get prosecuted and be found not guilty, get an SEC no-action letter, etc.