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Comment by gregdoesit | Hacker News Reader

> “ Despite cease-and-desist actions against Forsage for operating as a fraud in September 2020 by the Securities and Exchange Commission of the Philippines and in March 2021 by the Montana Commissioner of Securities and Insurance, the defendants allegedly continued to promote the scheme while denying the claims in several YouTube videos and by other means.”

Even now, the site Forsage.io is live, and claims that 2,559 people joined the past 24 hours. Who knows if it’s true.

But how does this work: when a site like this is charged with fraud, can it operate until there is a verdict, defrauding more unsuspecting victims? Needless to say, visitors to the site will have know knowledge of this lawsuit.

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If it's actually on chain as a smart contract, it can't be shut down unless the code was written to allow it.

You could make hosting and distribution of the code a prohibited act. Wanna still host that Blockchain if it can get you arrested? Just cus it lives as code doesn't mean someone or some group isn't responsible for distributing it.

> You could make hosting and distribution of the code a prohibited act. Wanna still host that Blockchain if it can get you arrested?

And there goes the blockchain.

I'm shocked it hasn't happened already given the fact that many popular blockchains allegedly host illegal images in the transaction metadata. That's all the FBI needs.

The only reason I can imagine is that blockchain and crypto are still useful to people in certain positions. Exfiltrating money from foreign regimes, etc.

If you ban something that can’t be banned and, surprise, people keep using the unbannable thing, it makes you look very very weak as a governance org.

That perception of weakness is significantly more costly than the existence of the target, especially when you can just control human minds via saying things like “look at how much energy it uses and it does nothing at all!” — and most people will believe it!

>Exfiltrating money from foreign regimes, etc.

Crypto isn't useful for that. The thing that's actually useful for that is the illegal, unregulated exchange that's making the trade. It doesn't matter what currency they trade it for, it could be anything else besides crypto tokens. Crypto actually just adds extra unnecessary steps because the end goal is almost always to get it back out in another local currency. Unless you plan to get the money and then only spend it on NFTs.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47130268

For anyone who isn't familiar with that story (maybe there are other cases, I'm not sure)

Seems more like (a very dark form of) trolling

On another note, restricting code like this is a terrible precedent. I believe code is part of free speech, but in many respects, even more sacred — like mathematics.

Now do the same, but with DNS records.

Being on chain doesn‘t have an impact if it still needs centralised architecture like DnS and a webserver with a static ip. It‘s no problem taking them down if it would be legal to do so. But I don‘t know why its not legal to simply cut them off.

Or if the majority of people running the blockchains (nodes or miners) write code to never accept transactions involving that contract or roll back the chain to before that contract was deployed or any number of things.

You think blockchain is immune to DDoS?

Good luck taking down Bitcoin.

I doubt the Filipino SEC or the Montana whatever office has the ability. The US SEC doesn’t prosecute but they can give information to Federal Prosecutors. My guess is they don’t have the legal authority or capability to do those things.

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