The TL;DR summary:
- Steem Soft Fork 22.2 was a contentious code change which (at worst) could have given rise to a complicated civil law suit;
- Steem Hard Fork 23 was an illegal act which could give rise to civil law suits and criminal investigations started either by authorities on their own, or prompted by victims who had their assets stolen.
The end of this post contains direct links to the exact blocks on the Steem blockchain, every one of these links is also recorded in archive.today. Blockchains may be forever, but only as long as someone runs the code. And running blockchain code is not risk free.
Full post: https://peakd.com/hf23/@brianoflondon/the-unbearable-lightness-of-being-a-hive-witness
Interesting summary.
Personally I think it's more important that we're dealing with the crypto mafia and none of those accounts are ever going to get their money back no matter what so arguing about it is largely pointless.
The weird thing about code and the law is that code is protected by free speech, but running code is not. This is where it get's even weirder with blockchain, because you can replay the node and run all the code without even having a connection to the Internet. The funds were moved on a block in the past, and the current state of the node isn't running illegal code. It is a wholly weird and unique situation that the law has never had to deal with before.
So who's at fault? The witness that signed the block? The other witnesses that allowed that block to become permanent? The centralized entity in the background pulling all the strings?
I don't think people realize that the legal precedents being set are going to have huge unintended overarching consequences. Good thing decentralization is highly resistant to these centralized rulesets.
This is true in America (sort of) but not everywhere. Blockchains are global. The code itself might not be a crime: running it made a crime happen. If I was running witness code which controlled millions of dollars belonging to people I'd never met in any and all countries of the world I'd be fanatically careful about what I ran.
I'm not a lawyer. I've had a completely torrid time with lawyers in Israel on a non-internet business case (finally over - draw, the lawyers won) so my first instinct is to run away from lawyers.
However: I'm trying to make coders understand the implications of what they're doing. Spending $500 on a lawyer to at least give you a hedged opinion that what you're about to run in a hard fork (or even a soft fork) is broadly permissible or at least defensible, seems like a small price to pay compared to block rewards.
Steem Witnesses did SF 22.2 without legal cover as far as I know, it is almost certainly ok, highly defensible and not a crime. I'm not sure what legal cover Justin Sun and the other conspirators had with HF23. Maybe none as well. I find it hard to believe they found a competent lawyer in this field to say HF23 is fine.
A criminal conspiracy. They all needed to take the pre-announce, pre-planned actions. I suspect that Sun, Steemit Inc and the three known human witnesses will all be co-defendants.
And answering something you said elsewhere (which Andrew has also addressed) LLC, LTC, and all other forms of corporate shield go out the window at the first hint of criminality AND they open you up for personal liability of debts owed by the corporation even if that wouldn't ordinarily be allowed. Rule 1 of being a director or owner of a company, don't break the law and don't allow or instruct your staff to break the law.