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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

#61

Post by SilverBirch »

DennisP wrote: post #58
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.

Their implementation of the Proof of Stake slashing is designed explicitly to prevent the type of censorship that is required to prevent transactions that breach sanctions.

Re: SEC Claims All of Ethereum Falls Under US Jurisdiction

#62

Post by namlem »

JohnHaugeland wrote: post #6
71a54xd wrote: post #4

Is this a joke? This is patently insane - the boneheaded logic behind this is unprecedented. Granted, looks like PoS might be DOA. PoW would've made this kind of draconian tom-foolery much more difficult.

so i don't mean to seem rude, but, i'm not really sure what other options there are if ethereum isn't bound by us law, is it that they should be bound by someone else's law, or not at all? like, you know that if you're a german person in france, and you make a visa transaction, because visa is an american company, they still have american requirements, right? so i'm not being sarcastic. i'm really genuinely asking. w…

Ethereum as a whole should not be bound by anyone's laws. Individual wallet holders and validators are bound by their local laws.

Re: SEC Claims All of Ethereum Falls Under US Jurisdiction

#63

Post by JohnHaugeland »

herbst wrote: post #49
JohnHaugeland wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so i don't mean to seem rude, but, i'm not really sure what other options there are if ethereum isn't bound by us law, is it that they should be bound by someone else's law, or not at all? like, you know that if you're a german person in france, and you make a visa transaction, because visa is an american company, they still have american requirements, right? so i'm not being sarcastic. i'm really genuinely asking. w…

> like, you know that if you're a german person in france, and you make a visa transaction, because visa is an american company, they still have american requirements, right? But how is Ethereum an American company? How does that even compare? When I use visa I signed up for their bullshit. When using Ethereum I never agreed to the US intercepting my data just because a relevant node is randomly in their jurisdiction…

> When using Ethereum I never agreed to the US intercepting my data just because a relevant node is randomly in their jurisdiction.

You seem to be under the impression that the law doesn't apply until you agree to it.

.

> If a node Europe solves my transaction block I it's not an US transaction, isn't it?

That's not really the point the SEC is making.

The point the SEC is making is "look, some of this traffic is in America, so we have to figure out if this traffic is actually legal in America."

Did you have a pure European transaction? Cool beans, this doesn't apply to you.

Re: SEC Claims All of Ethereum Falls Under US Jurisdiction

#64

Post by JohnHaugeland »

zeroclip wrote: post #59
JohnHaugeland wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/

> Your wall of text is incoherent and reveals a deep lack of understanding of the blockchain

I'm sorry that you chose to exit the polite conversation. Have a good day.

.

> Ethereum is now a green blockchain.

No, it's not.

Re: SEC Claims All of Ethereum Falls Under US Jurisdiction

#65

Post by JohnHaugeland »

herbst wrote: post #48
JohnHaugeland wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you make something in a country, it's subject to that country's laws. I don't know how this would be true. If anything operating from a country makes you subject to their law. I've wrote plenty of software while travelling. But I operate it from my homebase. That's a huge difference

> > If you make something in a country, it's subject to that country's laws. > > I don't know how this would be true. If anything operating from a country makes you subject to their law.

We're saying the same thing.

If you create something, and the thing you created is in country X, you made the thing in country X. It doesn't matter if you're in country Y at the time.

If I'm sitting in the United States, and I make something entirely on Japanese AWS servers, I built it in Japan. I wasn't in Japan, but the place it was built is Japan.

"I built it in X" doesn't mean "I was in X and I built it." "I built it in X" means "I built it, and the place it is is X."

We have trouble because it's only recently that these two concepts are meaningfully separable.

I'll phrase myself differently.

If a thing has been made, and its location is in Country X, then it is subject to the laws of Country X.

I accept that I wrote this poorly and that it's subject to misunderstanding that is my fault.

Re: SEC Claims All of Ethereum Falls Under US Jurisdiction

#66

Post by traveler01 »

boc wrote: post #40
ETH_start wrote: post #35

This is going to encourage US-based Ethereum users to stop runnning nodes, and users outside of the US to start running nodes, just to weaken the SEC's outrageous argument. The narrow-minded attempt by the SEC expand its jurisdiction, and by extension, budget, is going to cause long-term harm to US innovation and competitiveness. Another option is for the entire Ethereum network to cloak itself behind an onion-routin…

I’d make the opposite argument. Losing ETH will allow US devs and companies to work on actual technologies which are useful for society broadly.

What a closed minded take on cryptocurrencies.

There are a lot of people in countries where they government fu** up turning around to cryptocurrencies to hold their funds.

Re: SEC Claims All of Ethereum Falls Under US Jurisdiction

#67

Post by DennisP »

SilverBirch wrote: post #61
DennisP wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Their implementation of the Proof of Stake slashing is designed explicitly to prevent the type of censorship that is required to prevent transactions that breach sanctions.

Slashing only occurs in response to certain specific rule violations. Censorship isn't one of those, and there's no way censorship could be one of those because the protocol doesn't know what's outside of it.

To penalize censorship, you'd need to socially organize a hard fork that manually removes the stake of the censors. But you could do that with any proof-of-stake protocol.

So then the question is whether the purpose of proof-of-stake in general is to enable social forks against censoring validators. But I think it's pretty clear that the primary purposes of proof-of-stake are to eliminate proof-of-work's absurd carbon impact and to provide more cost-effective security. Ethereum's particular PoS design also enables the scaling methods coming next in the roadmap. Another benefit is more regular block production, which is nice for UI.

Meanwhile, PoW is not exactly prone to censorship either. If only 10% of the world's miners are willing to include a transaction, then it will just take 10X longer to get that transaction included. Any miner unwilling to build on blocks containing prohibited transactions is likely to pay an economic cost for that.

Finally, it's not clear that sanctions law impacts block producers anyway. OFAC hasn't attempted to enforce sanctions that way, and at least according to Coinbase's chief legal officer, the law clearly doesn't apply to miners or stakers: https://twitter.com/iampaulgrewal/status/1566225955248427008

Re: SEC Claims All of Ethereum Falls Under US Jurisdiction

#68

Post by zeroclip »

JohnHaugeland wrote: post #64
zeroclip wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

> Your wall of text is incoherent and reveals a deep lack of understanding of the blockchain I'm sorry that you chose to exit the polite conversation. Have a good day. . > Ethereum is now a green blockchain. No, it's not.

You are right, apologies I came on harshly. But your post does have a lot of inaccuracies.

Re: SEC Claims All of Ethereum Falls Under US Jurisdiction

#69

Post by mw888 »

bendews wrote: post #47
mw888 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Courts forcing forks I wouldn’t be so sure about that, unless you are equally convicted in that court’s jurisdiction’s conviction to outright ban the whole chain from use - because as soon as two courts mandate two different forks, one of them will be banning a chain that the rest of the globe has consensus on. It’s a lot like banning a whole region from sending mail because one person in that region got caught mai…

Right - but nothing is stopping them from making that law. Countries aren't simply going to adhere to a digital currencies protocol or allow it to avoid regulation because otherwise it goes against the "community spirit". Here we are talking about the hypothetical situation of the U.S claiming complete jurisdiction of Ethereum. The U.S could make whatever laws it likes around the usage of Ethereum, legislate that all…

Yeah, if larger jurisdictions behaved as such the issues I described are easier to avoid. I don’t think the regulatory bodies have an attitude towards crypto that would enable that large scale attempt at control, but we can see how it’s possible.

When your protocol’s primary use case relies on denominating centralized currency, it makes these types of network attacks far, far more effective when the attacker controls that currency. People have completely forgotten about any use case of a non-excludable censorship resistant network that isn’t tokens, but I digress.

Re: SEC Claims All of Ethereum Falls Under US Jurisdiction

#70

Post by Ebree »

isitmadeofglass wrote: post #57
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…

I also think banning free choice in shop by regulation is proper saving lives by gradually limiting toxic to human body carbohydrates in food to safest & healthiest level of zero... just after banning me option to buy healthiest human food and my daily meal - meat replacing it with cancerous plant-oil replacement. The safest roads - these where all people drive glass cars or tanks. Regulations as everything should also be decentralised & deglobalised. You don't like law? Go to the region with a different laws restrictions or none. But nobody wants promoting invasion of one option on other making it an authoritarian default.

Seatbelts in 99% cases helps in 1% damages you including burning up alive.

With full freedom you learn responsibility & create organic institutions to educate others & learn choosing good over bad.

When you limit freedom you push people into state of mental disability to evaluate reality on their own & dependency on centralised arbiter.

Leaving slave mentality & jump starting own brain takes a while. Often requires generational replacement.

I'm all in for full information and detailed labelling, state institutions with objective studies & product stamping. But never for any choice limitation.

I want to choose the filters, with option of none, not being forced to use one. I also want democracy with personal voting on each regulation & not being forced to vote for this or that package of things coerced into blindly accepting bulk of things attached to one thing i actually care about to change. Internet supposed to add to our regularly limited choices. What's it's feature and it's curse.

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