3 ms·
> It will not be legal for miners to run/"execute code on behalf of" smart contracts from the sanctioned list, which can be downloaded from the Treasury web sit
by Canada 4y ago
> It will not be legal for miners to run/"execute code on behalf of" smart contracts from the sanctioned list, which can be downloaded from the Treasury web site and is updated regularly. This is very akin to how the sanctioned people list works currently.
This has come up in other contexts before, most famously the idea of using OP_RETURN to embed child pornography into the Bitcoin blockchain.
An Ethereum client must download and execute all transactions in each block in order to determine if that block is valid, and thus learn current state of the system. The client can't know if this "illegal" transaction has been executed until it actually executes it. As an operator you don't have any choice, other than simply turning everything off and "rugging" all your customers.
So let's say you're Coinbase. You have billions of dollars of other people's money, innocent people's money, in your custody. If you refuse to process blocks that contain transactions involving sanctioned entities, or that contain illegal child pornography, you destroy those billions of dollars of assets.
You're not going to make billions of dollars of assets unspendable. Not a snowball's chance in hell. You will process those blocks as the protocol requires. Doing otherwise would be as ridiculous as Google turning off its entire search engine merely because some of its automated actions technically violate laws from time to time. It would be like Intel razing a whole semiconductor fab to the ground because it learned that some of the sand used in creating some wafers was sold by a sanctioned country.
There is absolutely no way the US government is going to demand that kind of destruction of value as a matter of compliance.
- salawat 4y agoIf the government so desired, it could essentially seize all assets represented by the chain, establish an exchange rate, and open the window of the Federal Reserve to redeem tokens when a person provides enough identifying information to redeem their Ethereum for fiat. Essentially making everyone whole for some definition of whole to be determined. It's been done before, in fact, back when the country was fresh out of the Revolution and getting it's feet under it, and disparate currencies consolidated. This is, in fact, exactly the kind of thing Governments tend to exist for.