“Due process rights”?  “Big government”?  There is hereby a much deeper issue:  The United States has an awful habit of arrogating to itself the power to impose global jurisdiction of its own laws, and even its mere whims.

I do not sufficiently know the facts of the case to make any particular pronouncements here; and unlike the armchair analysts already prouncing “guilt”, I will not pretend.  That said, however, it seems obvious that there may be some serious jurisdictional problems here.

A legal person (natural or corporate) not subject to the laws of the United States should not want “due process” according to American law.  For American law has no authority to try that person in the first place!

I hope that BitMEX’s lawyers, who are qualified at law and familiar with the facts, will raise front and centre every jurisdictional argument that they properly should.  It is not “a technicality”.  It is a matter of highest principle that bears on issues of sovereignty, and one of the essential differences between just laws and the unrestrained rampages of a rogue state.

To illustrate the nature of the issue, I will remark briefly on a completely unrelated case well-known to most here.

I have long been alarmed and angered by the propensity of some people to wish for the President of the United States to pardon Julian Assange.  How could the American chief executive “pardon” a man over whom the United States properly has no authority in the first instance?

(Of course, as a practical matter and for the sake of decency, I do wish that the American President would improperly pardon a man whose liberty should be posthaste restored, although his remaining health never can be.  That does not change the principle of the matter.  It also does not change the political reality that such a pardon is a pipe dream.)

To ask pardon admits the authority to punish, and guilt to be punished.  At that point, you have accepted the premise that the United States has a right to arrest, try, and convict Assange.

Now, turning back to BitMEX, you did mention jurisdiction:


Whereas if jurisdiction is lacking, then why should a defendant suffer trial before a court lacking proper authority, for alleged violation of laws that do not bind the defendant?  Why is the presumption of innocence even an issue?  Why should proofs be sought?

If a tinpot dictator on the other side of the world were to pass, within his jurisdiction, a decree that I, personally, am completely banned from Bitcoin, and if I were to violate his “law”, then should I seek “due process” in his court?  Or should I laugh?

On these types of issues, the only difference between that hypothetical tinpot dictator and the United States is guns, more guns, bombs, more bombs, tanks, aircraft carriers, ballistic missiles, and nuclear warheads, plus the economic and political muscle to seduce or coerce other countries’ corrupt governments without even bothering to shoot-up and incinerate a bunch of civilians.


^^^ THIS.

I am alarmed and, frankly, a little bit shocked at the general tenor of some of the talk here.

Just how did this U.S. government action suddenly, within a matter of days, so blacken the name of an exchange that, to my knowledge, has had a sterling reputation?  There are exchanges with credible scam accusations, theft under the rubric of “shotgun KYC”, rampant shitcoin pump-and-dump pushing, and all manner of other sleazy shenanigans.  I have never heard any such thing about BitMEX—still haven’t.  And now, some people are suddenly talking about them as criminals just because a U.S. prosecutor said so!

There’s an old saying—I don’t know where I first heard it—that in the United States, a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.

All I see thus far is news that, at first impression, looks very much like regulatory and prosecutorial overreach from a country that collectively acts as if it were the emperor of the world.

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Thanks for indirectly reminding me that I had the foregoing almost completed in my offline drafts box.  (Most of what I write is never posted, and much of it is never completed.)

Quote from: Last of the V8s on Today at 08:40:15 PM

Jacob Applebaum

Probably quite old news that I somehow missed, but...  He’s back in action?  Cool.  Although I disagree with many of his viewpoints (like Assange’s), he (like Assange) was always one of those principled types who would not stop at those invisible lines that you are never supposed to cross.^*  I think that that’s why he (like Assange) was targeted in some scandalous way.

(* Just for perhaps the least instance of that, Appelbaum considered Cloudflare to be an Internet-wide security bug, and accordingly opened a Tor issue that I tried to keep open back in 2017—around the time that my first Newbie-rank post here thanked theymos for telling the truth about Cloudflare.  2020 update:  Nothing has changed; Cloudflare is still a tool of corporate censorship and mass surveillance, as Appelbaum said.  They are untouchable.  In tech circles, the talk about them is almost all praise.  And that is relatively nothing compared to the dirt that Appelbaum was dragging out about the NSA and other intelligence agencies!)

I hope that he is still the same will-not-shut-up deadly-principled, stubborn loose cannon as he was before.  The world needs a few more of those.

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inb4 anyone accuses me of hypocrisy