Stephen Palley commented in MIT Technology Review on a class action suit seeking to force a cryptocurrency exchange to execute a so-called “rescue fork” to enable recovery of $170 million in lost funds.
“This is new,” says Stephen Palley, a partner at the Washington, DC, law firm Anderson Kill. In the wake of the 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, the US government sought a court order to force Apple to modify its code to give government investigators access to data on a locked iPhone—a so-called “back door.” So legal action to force a software change isn’t unprecedented. But because of the way blockchains work, ordering a rescue fork would be," says Palley. “Unlike proprietary software code on a company server, public blockchains aren’t controlled by any one entity. Instead, they are hosted by multiple “nodes” in a network that can be distributed across the world. This raises new logistical questions. For example, how would a court impose such an order on people outside the US?”
To read the article: Fork this: What an unprecedented court battle says about the future of cryptocurrency