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Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

I am ignorant, but do they expect government to contact them? I assumed sanctions are sanctions - you broadcast publish them rather than try to inform each and every entity specifically. So this feels like either incompetent ignorance, Or wilful pretence ignorance.

<snide comment> Which, hey, Crypto... </snide comment>

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The US government should publish a contract with a single, isBanned(address), function that implementers can leverage to stay compliant.

For efficiency they could just have it return “true” for everybody.

They already do, it's the OFAC SDN list. [1] Everyone in the money transmission business is not just free to leverage this list but required by law to. If you search for 'tornado' in the plain text version, you'll find the list of blacklisted addresses.

[1] https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/...

It's incredible how national security became the channel through which to make the US internet more like China's state controlled one.

National security is usually the justification for oppression, followed by "the common good".

National security is a subset of "the common good" argument, but one more focused on averting harm, than improving the state of society.

The only way you'd come to that conclusion is if you'd never been to the PRC.

The SDN list has nothing, and I do mean nothing, to do with internet censorship.

This is nothing compared to China-level internet censorship, but barring Americans from interacting with a decentralized protocol that a contract address on the SDN list resolves to, is censorship.

And the restrictions will have to massively escalate, possibly to CCP-levels (with restrictions on end-user access strong encryption) to effectively enforce such prohibitions, as cryptocurrency becomes more ubiquitous.

“If US Government ever make applications for Ethereum, it means I’ve won.”

Vitalik Buterin, probably.

I don't know if this is a joke, but no.

Yes, the quote was originally Linus Torvalds saying "If Microsoft ever builds applications for Linux then I've won". Can't find a direct source from when he said it but that's what the joke was referencing.

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