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Comment by blotter_paper | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, but then they could be ordered to take it down. I think the idea is to be censorship resistant in such a way that the company itself cannot make exceptions when pressured by a court, but I'm forgetting if that's me reading between the lines or if Dorsey explicitly talks about censorship resistance.

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I guarantee you that if you tell a judge you can't take something down "because you use blockchain" the judge will not care and just sanction your company.

To the degree that you provide a service the courts can order you not to provide it. If you've built something which makes it necessary to remove all content to remove any content, that's on you.

We've learned that you can't get around the law (eg. court orders) "because blockchain". The government has shown us that the law prevails.

But it actually is being shown to work.

When was the last time that a court successfully reversed a transaction on the Bitcoin Blockchain? The answer is never.

Sure, they have sent court orders to companies, or whatever, but the blockchain itself has never been reversed by court order.

Telling the government "I know you've told me to take it down, but we specifically designed it in such a way that we can't take it down" sounds like an incredibly good legal strategy that will definitely not backfire.

So far, the "we can't do that" defense has worked for companies that provide E2E encryption. The government may change the rules, of course; they keep talking about it.

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