Crypto Theft - looking at legalities of Justin Sun forking stake away from Steem and Dlive
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|---|---|---|
| Crypto Queen | Today at 2 pm MST ****Countdown Ticker**** | Hive Discord |
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| Vimm |
@apshamliton and @brianoflondon at an interview on Block TV.
Is there recourse?
In this episode, we discuss the legal ramifications...and options...if you are hard forked or hacked away from your stake in a blockchain crypto currency. We also discuss a class action crypto suit headed up by Andrew Hamilton's Litigation Fund, JPB Liberty, against Google and Facebook for allegedly disallowing bonafide crypto companies from advertising within their contracts to do so. Learn how you can get involved through @jpbliberty.
Join us today with guests @apshamilton and @brianoflondon as they give us the lowdown on each issue. And please feel free to read up on the issues as @apshamilton makes his pro bono opinions below:
1. Warning: Do NOT run HF23 until stolen funds are returned. Doing so may implicate you in a criminal conspiracy
2. Pro Bono Legal Opinion for Victims of Steem HF23 & Bittrex
Was an interesting discussion, to be sure. I think we are vastly underestimating Sun's ability to avoid prosecution and his obvious option to dump Steem to zero. A lot of us view him as some idiot that just swooped in and got punked. Now he's running around the playground smashing the other kid's sandcastles. I don't think tattle-telling to his parents is going to have the effect we expect it to.
On the other side of the discussion was the whole Facebook ad class-action lawsuit, which I find a bit more interesting because it's less close to home. Sounds like Facebook and Google have their work cut out for them.
I had the same thought. But I feel like we addressed that. SEC and prosecution will place value on the amount that was stolen at the time it was stolen, and/or the WORTH we can establish at the time it was stolen.
As for the class action, it was actually quite impressive to see how well prepared they do seem. I'll be curious to see how that pans out.
Honestly I'm going to be pretty surprised if he's not able to use Steemit Inc, the witnesses, and his country of origin as a meat shield. The idea that he would somehow be forced to pay out of his own pocket to make these reparations is so outlandish and out of the realm of possible outcomes for me... let's just say I'll believe it when I see it.
Exactly which court are we expecting him to physically step foot in?
I expect this matter to continue to be tried in the court of public opinion, and that's about it.
Although I will admit that it would look pretty good for Hive if we had our own Craig Wright situation popping up in the news circuit constantly.
It's because he owns 51% operating share. He is a centralized entity. He doesn't get to blame anyone else. His country of origin won't matter. The jurisdiction can lie in the Plaintiff's territory. They could do a multi complaint approach, or a joint plaintiff approach, and he'd have to answer wherever he was sued. If I were them, I'd take a multi-state, multi-complaint approach.
Did you pose these questions in the chat, cuz these would have been great to discuss. Sorry if I missed them.
Yeah I mean clearly Steem is a security I don't think anyone questions that. Still, I think crypto mafia wins, and I'm not talking about no Triads. The biggest cartel in the world are central bankers themselves. The scariest mobsters aren't murderous psychos; they're tubby pencil-pushers that sit behind a desk.
Eeep. And tubby, no less.
Agustin Carstens
Home for dinner.
Actually Justin Sun currently resides in San Francisco CA. and Steemit is a U.S. registered company. Plus Justin( as well as 11 others) is already involved in a large class action lawsuit for.... selling unregistered securities(tron and others). Since Justin and these others have centralized these tokens under their control they are no longer considered a decentralized token but a security.
That is correct. They would be treated as a security. It is not decentralized. I don't see how this changes the argument?
Lets remember that Justin Sun now owns a tremendous amount of POWERED UP Steem and even with 4 week power down, he's vulnerable to a dump and a precipitous drop in value.
I personally believe that will happen and that the entire network could collapse because law enforcement could arrest him and the current witness pool at some point. They'd be seizing computers and pulling them off line at that point too (which is paradoxically the exact opposite of what you need to do if you want to preserve blockchain evidence of a crime!).
I do hope law enforcement has at least SOME wherewithal? And that Sun realizes the impact of NOT cooperating?
Did you know that COPS with high IQ can get disqualified from the job?
True story.
I DID know this....hrrrmm...
#wuddoowedonow?
How's that? The evidence literally can't be destroyed that's the whole point of blockchain.
All they need to do is prove their target was signing blocks with the private key recovered.
It's not like all the witness nodes are just sitting in the same place.
If they start going offline new ones will just get voted back in.
Again, this is the entire point of the system.
I would make the argument that Sun doesn't need to powerdown any of his stake to tank the market. He owns enough liquid Steem to do it all without a powerdown. He had at least 5M liquid when this all started and who knows how much he has now. He got a Hive airdrop of at least 5M coins and a lot of that got pumped back into Steem when Binance opened the Hive doors.
Now that 26M coins have been taken off the table and all the powerdowns are about to complete, selling pressure is going to go away, not the other way around.
You guys seem to be making so many errors reading this situation I just can't imagine it's going to turn out like you think it will. Same team though. I'm obviously rooting for our side, and like you said, Steem could tank at literally any moment, that much is certain. It all depends on the whims of one individual.
I'm wondering who will still run Steem if the witnesses who ran Hard Fork 23 are taken away: all the Justin Sun Steemit Inc sock puppets and the three known human witnesses.
Do you think the Hive witnesses who still run a few bits of Steem infrastructure will have much reason to once the bulk of the power downs have ended?
Fight back for your right! There shouldn't be anyone to be possible to steal your account, laws are surpassed.
We ended up having a marvelous little discussion. I'll be posting it by tomorrow, so be sure and swing around for a listen! I didn't see you in the chats! We would have loved to have you.
HIVE.D!