In the boring fusty old world of law, where the past lives but still somehow operates pretty well, there are two concepts that render this tractable. The first

In the boring fusty old world of law, where the past lives but still somehow operates pretty well, there are two concepts that render this tractable. The first is process serving. To start a lawsuit you need to be able to identify and notify the other party (except in very special circumstances). If you transact with anonymous counterparties, you won't get much help from the courts. The second is a nexus. Basically, it's something the court has the authority to reach out and grab. It might be property, a passport, a right, money, accounts, whatever. So long as the court can make an order and someone, somewhere will enforce it, there's a nexus. Without a nexus a court's order is just warm paper. Wave it all you like, the other guy won't feel any heat. If you don't have a nexus -- if trust and authority is totally distributed, relying on code you hope is the first bug-free code you've ever written in your life -- then it's pretty hard to go from starting a dispute to receiving compensation or enforcing retribution. Distributing trust sounds really cool, but it turns out that the unit economics suck. There are economies of scale involved for both malicious actors and those who want to punish them. In the current ecosystem, the adversaries are few and their interests highly concentrated. The defenders are many, widely dispersed and poorly able to coordinate their efforts. This is the sort of situation centralised trust is much better at sorting out. I am of course not a lawyer and nothing here is not legal advice.