I was hoping BM would address this in yesterday's mumble, but he wasn't available. How would you defend the safety of BitShares against a negative, (but true) perspective like "the ability to freeze assets is built into every BitShares client"? Tho the statement is true it does sound like a sophist sound bite.
Is a simple explanation possible for non crypto nerds and techie types? If you qualified the quoted statement by adding ", but only for those accounts that trade through a gateway service", would that be accurate? What assurances (if any) could be made about how safe from "gateway tool control" such accounts would be? Are such assurances applicable to accounts that used a gateway once in the distant past but no longer do?
We've always said if you protect your private account keys and keep them private, there is no way anyone can take your funds. Are we now saying that such safety is impossible if you ever use a gateway? How is a "gateway" different from Mt. Gox?
quote author=Thom link=topic=12183.msg160892#msg160892 date=1418342971]
Here's one I would like BM to answer. It jumped off the page as I was perusing the nullstreet marketing newsletter.
Legal Compliance
Any company that takes deposits from customers and facilitates transfers among customers is heavily regulated in most countries. These regulations include license requirements, bonds, insurance, know your customer laws, and anti-money-laundering compliance among others. The BitShares block chain provides gateways with all of the tools necessary to comply with these regulations.
If you are in this business you are already maintaining a database tracking user deposits and your database is probably logging every single transaction and balance change. Your database knows exactly who is owed what at any point in time. You also have the power to seize or freeze user balances at the demand of law enforcement. BitShares provides you with all of these features as well including:
1) Ability to white list public keys that may control a balance of your asset.
2) Ability to freeze all funds and stop all trading of your assets
3) Ability to transfer any balance of your asset from any user to any other user
In other words, if you are operating a legally complaint crypto currency exchange, then you can easily expand your business to becoming a BitShares gateway.
My question is, how are these toolkit features limited to gateways only, and what safeguards insure they cannot be used against non-gateway accounts / addresses?
There's probably many ways this could be accomplished, and I'd be shocked if there was any possibility non-gateway accounts could "fall prey" to asset seizure, but I would like this answered by BM explicitly given how onerous it sounds. Less technical types may be driven away if they hear "the ability to freeze assets is built into every BitShares client".
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