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> It's not legally property. Legally you don't own it. If the network suddenly changes its rules and says it's not yours then you have no legal recourse against

• nybble41 5y ago
  > If you held some assets on a blockchain and the developers decided to block your address after you made fun of them on twitter or something, it certainly seems like you'd have standing to sue. What exactly would you sue them over? The design always depended on the voluntary consent of everyone involved. The developers never promised that the protocol would remain unchanged. This has happened before—for example, the Etherium hard-fork that reversed withdrawals from the DOA which were unexpected and unintended but authorized by the smart contract code—and no one on the losing side of that fork managed to successfully sue the developers for changing the protocol. They would have had standing if anyone did. The developers don't even fully control it; as an open, distributed system, someone else can step in and supplant them with new client software if users (meaning mainly buyers and retailers accepting the currency) decide they prefer different rules. Whatever changes the developers might make is only an expression of their opinions about how the system should work. Other users of the network are not obligated to accept those changes if they happen to disagree.