In effect, as my colleague Dan Kuhn noted adroitly last year, the U.S. government is sanctioning innocent coders in an effort to carry out a national security operation. “So far unable to actually persecute North Korea itself or bring to justice any suspected hackers – who are thought to be funding the wayward country’s nuclear missiles program, no less – the U.S. government is making an example out of a couple cryptocurrency coders,” Kuhn said.
But the Tornado case is about more than privacy and even government overreach. It’s about whether governments should be able to stop transactions over open-source protocols that nobody controls. The reality of this, ironically, is proven by the very case itself. Even if Pertsev, Storm and Semenov go to prison for a dozen years, the smart contracts they created will still operate, just like Bitcoin continues to operate without a CEO or recognized founder.
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