@European Central Bank. I would not criticize them if they announce that they are a centralized platform. I reckon the code is law idea was not a good one in any case. In law, the recourse of human intervention as a choice should always be open.
EOS is not marketed as a centralized platform. And that they are marketed as a blockchain solution implies some things, which might not, as we suspect, be true.
Such as immutability or censorship resistance. I think pretty much everyone has boundaries, like a barrier that says "I don't want people to use this technology for this". In fact, I think I have quite a lot of them, including almost every illegal activity (darknet stuff and such). Do I think this makes it right to ban/censor/prevent certain transactions? It's difficult. Looking at specific cases, I'm inclined to say yes. Looking at the repercussions of those actions over the whole system, my answer is "definitely not".
I'm looking at the Steemit post above and I think "Someone's going to be really happy that they'll get their money back. Good for them!"
On the other hand, there's a comment in the comment section of a poor guy who bought one of the locked accounts. Yes, he probably shouldn't have. But you know, someone before him probably shouldn't have entered their private key in some phishing site.
Finding justice in a juristical system is a tedious and complicated process. We are kidding ourselves when we think, some block producers are able to make such complicated decisions. ANd while you might say "they are only freezing the funds, they are not the ones making the ultimate call", their actions have real world impact, as can be seen in the comment above.
Accounts are complex things. What if part of the account's activity is legitimate? Like, a hacker sends his funds to an exchange. the block producers realize it too late, ask the exchange to freeze the tokens, but the exchange decides not to comply. Would it be ok for the block producers to freeze the exchanges wallet, affecting hundreds, if not thousands of uninvolved people to force them to comply?
This is very, very difficult legal territory, and saying "the code is law" where it is applicable, is actually a stroke of genius. Because, really, it's more like "the code is the laws of physics" for that system. To change them would mean to risk the integrity of the whole system.
Plus, there
is governance. Ethereum forked. Bitcoin integrated segwit. I think building any type of governance structure into the blockchain itself is wrong. You
want governance to be as slow and clunky as possible, because you only want to change things when you really, really have to.
In general, believing that you could replace laws by code is foolish. But when it comes down to certain cases, like "who has how much money", you shouldn't count on large groups of people. What if they decide that maybe for their taste, you have a bit too much money?
Sorry for my rambling, I hope it was somewhat understandable what I am trying to say.
