the thing is, the gvt is not going to get involved in a situation where drug dealers steal coin from other drug dealers and then try to sell them off on an anonymous exchange in Bulgaria. they only care if they themselves can get their hands on the BTC which in this Evo case, they cannot. so they'll just let the community shoot it out and the final result will be just like every other theft in Bitcoinland since Day 1; nothing.
The govt's role is super simple:
- Mandate a license and enforce it on key retailers and service providers of the on-line wallet type (e.g., Coinbase...who probably won't take much convincing...)
- Charter a service (e.g., CoinValidation) or two which do validation.
The licensee just uses a simple API from the validator.
When this occurs I will require that if you want to send me BTC, you do it through my Coinbase account. Yes, I'm vehemently opposed to the whole system, but I'm not going to take a bullet by absorbing your unvalidated BTC which I may not be able to spend and have to trade to someone else who will also will value unvalidated BTC at a lower rate.
To make matters worse, anyone who is enough of a chump to accept unvalidated BTC will find people wishing to dump them beating a path to one's door.
I would also caution against assuming that a validation solution cannot work because of the difficulty of the task. Validation need not be anything remotely precise or even accurate. I think we'll find that the amount of liability protection afforded to a validating service in association with their charter would make the vaccine manufactures blush.
TPTB have a good friend in Mr. Andresen and thus a very strong hand. I won't go into the game theory, but there are still a bunch of ways to overplay the hand that they have here. A person who is on the ball, and who has a bit of luck, may be able to come out of this thing fairly well.