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SEC Claims All of Ethereum Falls Under US Jurisdiction

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Re: SEC Claims All of Ethereum Falls Under US Jurisdiction

#51

Post by bendews »

adastra22 wrote: post #33
bendews wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but they can't force you to decrypt it if the key is lost or you don't give in. A very US-centric view is it not? Many places can force you to decrypt something by law. In fact the US does on entry to the country and can refuse entry if you do not comply. > there ain't shit they can do to actually enforce that demand. Watch forks become more commonplace and "official" forks being recognised and non-official forks b…

> A very US-centric view is it not? Many places can force you to decrypt something by law. In fact the US does on entry to the country and can refuse entry if you do not comply. I must not be explaining well, because you're saying the same thing I am. There can be consequences for refusing to comply, ranging from being turned away at the border to being thrown in jail, all the way to, in some countries, torture and e…

Completely see where you are coming from now - absolutely agree.

On your second point - where I am coming from is that there is nothing stopping countries from creating laws which introduce these powers and outlaw methods to avoid the new legislation. No it doesn't work with the current architecture. But we absolutely can end up in a situation where there is a U.S Ethereum chain where all nodes are legally required to follow updates/forks to the chain as they occur, caused by various court orders to reverse transactions etc. At this point the consensus can go whichever the government likes because those operating the nodes would want to be participating in the current legal chain.

Re: SEC Claims All of Ethereum Falls Under US Jurisdiction

#52

Post by throwaway743 »

eurasiantiger wrote: post #31
customkitchen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take that angle then crypto will still never be a legitimate investment class either way, because all of it (including BTC and ETH and everything else) is a giant fraud predicated on the falsehood that it is "decentralized" and somehow that makes it unregulated. There is no other reason for it to exist. This is just another nail in the coffin, they can't lie about it anymore. If crypto-land really wants to fol…

Wouldn’t it make more sense to legalize the market?

US gov has a way of keeping certain things illegal that would otherwise take away employment and purpose of their own agencies. Just look at the DEA/"war on drugs".

Re: SEC Claims All of Ethereum Falls Under US Jurisdiction

#53

Post by throwaway743 »

JohnHaugeland wrote: post #14
yucky wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Google a US company? Ethereum is an open source protocol with an unknown number of applications. I'm not sure this works as an analogy.

I'm discussing the law, not an analogy. It's a real system that was made in the United States. You don't have to be a company to be subject to the law. If you make something in a country, it's subject to that country's laws. Think about it: you're basically suggesting that if you call something "a protocol," somehow it's no longer subject to the rule of law. We go through "well yeah but it's not a" every couple of ye…

iirc the main authors of Ethereum are not US citizens nor did they develop it in the US.

Re: SEC Claims All of Ethereum Falls Under US Jurisdiction

#54

Post by peterisza »

Ekaros wrote: post #43
mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #30

> “validated by a network of nodes on the Ethereum blockchain, which are clustered more densely in the United States than in any other country.” The SEC then concludes: “As a result, those transactions took place in the United States.” I wonder what other legal implications this precedent has (if it holds). I probably won't think of any before hitting send on this comment, but this seems like the type of claim suffic…

The reverse of this is interesting. IF large number of validators moved out from USA servers. Would then the transactions be outside USA? And would someone track at all times where the majority or validators are? Or likely plurality?

I agree. They are trying to force an outdated concept. They should adapt faster.

Re: SEC Claims All of Ethereum Falls Under US Jurisdiction

#55

Post by SilverBirch »

Honestly, I think the behaviour of the ethereum devs have led them to an inevitable head on fight with basically every large jurisdiction. You can't build a system that is explicitly designed to process transactions from sanctioned countries and expect that the no one is going to step in. It would be one thing if the devs could answer the simple question of "Who, other than Iran and North Korea need this?", but literally that is the only problem they're solving. The best case scenario is that Ethereum is going to end up as a fragmented cluster fuck where the biggest entities are compliant with US and EU law whilst a small cohort of entities are still helping the North Koreans launder money, or Ethereum caves and the core of their PoS algorithms are changed. And it's not unlikely that along the road to them caving there will be prison sentences.

The US government is not going to go "Ah, I see you've found a grey area, let us carefully consider this". It's going to go "Iran. Terrorism. Shut it down."

Re: SEC Claims All of Ethereum Falls Under US Jurisdiction

#56

Post by adastra22 »

bendews wrote: post #51
adastra22 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A very US-centric view is it not? Many places can force you to decrypt something by law. In fact the US does on entry to the country and can refuse entry if you do not comply. I must not be explaining well, because you're saying the same thing I am. There can be consequences for refusing to comply, ranging from being turned away at the border to being thrown in jail, all the way to, in some countries, torture and e…

Completely see where you are coming from now - absolutely agree. On your second point - where I am coming from is that there is nothing stopping countries from creating laws which introduce these powers and outlaw methods to avoid the new legislation. No it doesn't work with the current architecture. But we absolutely can end up in a situation where there is a U.S Ethereum chain where all nodes are legally required t…

> At this point the consensus can go whichever the government likes because those operating the nodes would want to be participating in the current legal chain.

I think this is an unwarranted assumption on your part. Capital would flee the US-controlled fork, causing the price of US-ETH tokens to plummet and staking to centralize. At that point there'd be absolutely no reason for US-ETH to exist: you could operate the same system more efficiently without a blockchain, and by isolating the system you would have lost the main, if not only advantage that blockchain systems have today: low-friction international transactions. Corporate entities which stick with the US-ETH split would find their revenues dry up very fast. I guarantee you that those which survive would be looking for ways to go multinational in their corporate structure so they can continue supporting ETH for non-US participants, and focus all of their efforts there. All this would do is isolate and exclude the US from participating in blockchain innovation.

Re: SEC Claims All of Ethereum Falls Under US Jurisdiction

#57

Post by isitmadeofglass »

metadat wrote: post #2

This battle was always hanging far off in the fog of the horizon, and now it's coming into the spotlight for primetime. Can technology defeat the bureaucrats of the United States Government? Time will reveal all.

It’s funny that the base assumption is always that all bureaucracy is bad and needs to be demolished. If the same mentality has reigned in the automotive industry proper as it does in the new tech-automotive industry, the concept of crash tests would never had been invented, we’d just put the car on the market and do statistics on how many of the customers died. The concept of phased studies to show efficacy and lack of toxicity in drugs wouldn’t exist. We’d just sell whatever and stop producing the drugs that killed people and focus on the ones that seemed to work in market.

The idea that “the consumer chose the product so all responsibility is theirs” is extremely naive and not echoed anywhere else, so why is it that the crypto space seems to feel that they should be completely excerpt of all regulations even as we see constant scams, theft and real, life detailing financial damages pushed onto the consumers who enter into the space in good faith.

Re: SEC Claims All of Ethereum Falls Under US Jurisdiction

#58

Post by DennisP »

SilverBirch wrote: post #55

Honestly, I think the behaviour of the ethereum devs have led them to an inevitable head on fight with basically every large jurisdiction. You can't build a system that is explicitly designed to process transactions from sanctioned countries and expect that the no one is going to step in. It would be one thing if the devs could answer the simple question of "Who, other than Iran and North Korea need this?", but liter…

It's a global p2p network that anyone can join. It's not "explicitly designed to process transactions from sanctioned countries," any more than any other blockchain. It doesn't even have base-layer privacy like zcash or monero.

Re: SEC Claims All of Ethereum Falls Under US Jurisdiction

#59

Post by zeroclip »

JohnHaugeland wrote: post #34
ouEight12 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a real system that was made in the United States Not sure that's true (most of the founder folk appear to be non-US based, and the foundation is Swiss if I'm not mistaken), nor is it what the US Govt is claiming. The SEC appears to be saying "45% of the validator nodes on the network are US based, therefore the transactions happened here, and our laws apply". Which is a horribly bad statistical assumption by a…

> Not sure that's true (most of the founder folk appear to be non-US based, and the foundation is Swiss if I'm not mistaken) Sorry, I could have been more clear when writing. This was my fault. I meant this physically. The network nodes are physical, and they're in the United States. If you are from France, you go to Japan, buy a bunch of arcade machines, then bring them to the US, and make an arcade company, I'm lik…

Your wall of text is incoherent and reveals a deep lack of understanding of the blockchain. ETH doesn't "go over to American nodes" and validators running in the EU are not like American-made arcade machines.

> with the massive environmental damage it's doing in climate change's 11th hour.

Ethereum is now a green blockchain. https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/

Re: SEC Claims All of Ethereum Falls Under US Jurisdiction

#60

Post by aaaaaaaaata »

boc wrote: post #39
metadat wrote: post #2

This battle was always hanging far off in the fog of the horizon, and now it's coming into the spotlight for primetime. Can technology defeat the bureaucrats of the United States Government? Time will reveal all.

If the US government goes to war with crypto, it’s not going to be a long fight. The exodus of corporate capital from the ecosystem will be a fatal blow to crypto prices and projects. Rule number one is don’t fight the IRS.

> fatal blow to crypto prices

wat? Worse than $900 ETH? Not too sure.

> Rule number one is don’t fight the IRS.

Google or Twitter search "boating accident"

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