[Cryptography] playing lawyer, Incentive Politics

[Sebastian Stache]

On 2023-10-11 23:06, John Levine wrote:
> It appears that Sebastian Stache via cryptography <zeb at qtt.se> said:
>> Be it for "the pure pleasure of destruction", or to "end the CO2
>> emissions" or, most likely, simple sour grapes; Yes, to "wipe out $BTC"
>> is both illegal and prosecutable, as is hacking mining pools and
>> currency exchanges.
> 
> You know how we feel when lawyers start making assertions about the way
> cryptography works?
> 
> I am not aware of any laws directly regulating Bitcoin. I know a lot
> of laws related to fraud, but they depend on the intent to defraud people
> who expect you to do something but you do something else. If you set up
> your own private mining pool to unwind the blockchain, and have no
> connection to the people who find their wallets depopulated* via the
> longest chain algorithm, where's the fraud?
> 
> If you think it's illegal it would be a help if you could say under
> what laws and in what countries.
> 
> R's,
> John

I know what you mean, beware of lawyers (and politicians) making 
technological assertions.

But I do think there is explicit Bitcoin legislation in the EU, the 
United States, China, Canada, Japan, Australia, Singapore, South Korea, 
India and Brazil. The UK regards crypto currency as property. El 
Salvador and CAR both have adopted Bitcoin as a national currency. An 
uncomprehensive list and possibly partly erroneous.

However: Suppose that you managed to fulfill your malicious Bitcoin 
destruction by (magically or perhaps quantum wishfully) mining a new, 
technically valid, longest chain from block 1 (disregarding protocol 
changes and forks). Since your intention is to "wipe out" Bitcoin and 
since you like to refer to this act as "unwinding" the chain, I presume 
that you would falsify each and every one of your new blocks (they 
wouldn't contain all and only the real transactions in the real order; 
if they did, your new chain would be equivalent to the real one, and 
Bitcoin wouldn't be destroyed).

Because of this, I would argue that, even without any Bitcoin specific 
legislation, you could be prosecuted with 811,866+ counts of anything 
from fraud to terrorism.

As SEC Chairman Gary Gensler put it: "Nothing about the crypto markets 
is incompatible with the securities law; investor protection is just as 
relevant, regardless of underlying technologies".