Also on that other note I'd be very curious to see how much flak the witnesses get for allowing this behavior. We absolutely must test the boundaries of this network to see how decentralized we really are. It may turn out to be an excellent opportunity to get witnesses from other countries that have much more lax financial laws.
The witnesses also have a great excuse. They are not the ones broadcasting these operations. If the operations being broadcast were somehow deemed illegal, it's hard to go after a witness just for being a small part of the network. Even if escrow services for Hive were eliminated we could simply make a new permissionless token and remake them stronger than ever.
I want to highlight this to @apshamilton. He's long said to me that transactions on a blockchain network should be considered exactly as any other speech and in this respect, platform owners, Witnesses in our case here, should be fully insulated from whatever speech occurs at least under the US's 1st Amendment. The only people responsible would be those carrying it out.
Indeed I feel like the first amendment should protect us from a lot of the legacy regulation. There's a big difference between a server running code and simply storing the information from a decentralized ledger validated by a worldwide network.
Yes, a properly decentralised network is just a digital printing press, printing new pages of transactions people send to it. The transactions only have the value that people ascribe to them.
The First Amendment protects freedom of the press so any attempt to impose licensing or other restrictions on this would breach the First Amendment.
I am surprised that neither Telegram nor Kik ran this argument in their disputes with the SEC, but I suppose they weren't properly decentralised.
Corporations don't know how to decentralize ownership because they are too greedy.
Correct. This has been @apshamilton's contention and there are definitely grounds to mount law suits in the US over the constitutionality over much of the crypto regulation... but we're busy on the other side of the world!