Iron man google drive4/27/2024 ![]() ![]() "According to a person at a company who received a recent subpoena request, the SEC’s probe of the Swiss-based Ethereum Foundation began shortly after the blockchain’s shift to a new governance model known as “proof-of-stake” in September of 2022.". "Democrats to SEC: Don't approve spot Ethereum ETFs and any other crypto ETPs". "US Congressional Group ‘Disturbed’ by Crypto Mining Energy Usage". On the other hand, they are calling on their allies in the SEC to reject the Ethereum ETF, while the SEC is using Ethereum's transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake - which reduced its energy consumption by 99.99% - as the legal justification to designate Ethereum a security and thereby severely reduce the market's access to it. On the one hand, Congress' anti-crypto contingent is raising alarm over Bitcoin's energy consumption. Unstated, I was also wondering whether the folk wisdom that so many people repeat, and which some seem to rely upon, is informed by the expertise of the rare people in a position to know the full reality.Įven if it's true, it does sound like a stereotypical computer person's misunderstanding of how law works: "Aha! But this Constitutional interpretation says that government can't compel speech! Checkmate!" Hence, checking that. (After all, we are talking about situations involving gags.)įor example, I was guessing maybe there's someone at the ACLU who has heard of enough of the non-public to give good counsel. ![]() My question was where would someone go to get counsel about canaries, from someone who knows how this actually works in practice, not only in the legal precedents that are public info. (I did it myself, when I was just a random city committee volunteer, and we were considering an issue that I figured the ACLU could help inform.) I agree that getting in contact with the ACLU is easy. The tech choices there seem be heavy on minimizing risk of IT drama, but the canary seemed to flirt with drama.) Though, as much as its canary looked like probably a signal of principled old-school Internet techie values, it also looked like potentially a bit of a magnet for trouble, in business it might attract, and in who it might antagonize. Or is there sufficiently binding official assurance from government that canaries done a certain way are OK, no matter what happens in some non-public meeting? Would the lawyer have to have been the veteran top litigator who handled the situations that reached the ear of the ACLU, or who previously worked on those situations on behalf of some facet of government? If that actually does happen, and canaries ever failed to stand up in them, then how many lawyers would ever be in a position to hear about those failures, such that the lawyer could competently advise clients how to use canaries successfully? I imagine that canary questions sometimes come up in non-publicly-disclosed legal proceedings, as well as in the occasional extra-legal practice. That's a very strong legal position and you wouldn't have a hard time getting a lawyer to back you up on it.īasically, if your "canary" requires you to "take down" something, it's not a proper canary and, yeah, I wouldn't trust it to protect you from much. Eg, they can't make you commit wire fraud by actively lying to your customers about the services you provide. What they absolutely cannot legally do is compel you to do something illegal. The government has a lot of power to legally compel you to not do things that would otherwise be legal (eg, uttering the speech "we just got a subpeona for all of your data!"). In the US at least, publicly posting a digitally signed message asserting something presumably important and valuable about your business that's knowingly a lie would be considered false advertising, wire fraud, etc. That approach is extremely robust legally. If you ever stop posting those, that's the signal to users that something is up. You have to set it up so that someone has to actually go and do something for the updated canary to go up, so it's like a dead man's switch. The original idea was that on some regular cadence (say weekly), you actively post a (hopefully signed) message somewhere saying "I hereby attest that, as of, we have not received any warrants/subpeonas/etc and are not subject to any gag orders, etc. Unfortunately, this new, wrong interpretation of the original idea seems to have become more common. Under the "original" sense of canaries, your scenarios wouldn't make sense. ![]() But, IMO, that's not what I expect if someone says "warrant canary". This is fair given what Ethereum just did. ![]()
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