> The only way to apply the court’s judgement (in the case of ETH) is to hark fork, because there is no governance contract in place.
Courts can and do issue orders against any kind of asset in order to enforce justice and unlike smart contracts, their orders are backed by men and women with dogs and guns.
Put another way: a court will not say "gee, gosh, if only ETH had a mechanism I could give orders for! I guess I'm beaten". They will instead say "you owe $X and I will seize all assets you have today, or will ever possess in future, in order to pay that debt". And when it turns out that people thought they were clever by evading the court order by keeping everything in a coin, they will then learn that ethereum can't buy top bunk at the federal penitentiary if you don't have access to a computer.
We are talking about two different things. I’m talking about a decentralized algorithm which runs on your own machine and can reach a conclusion about a transaction being invalid even though it may have a valid signature.
For example, imagine the thief just burns the ETH. $600mm notional value is destroyed in a few bytes of crypto. Whether someone goes to jail or not is besides the point.
Can the funds be recovered, and what is the algorithmic mechanism to provide for that recovery?
Courts can and do issue orders against any kind of asset in order to enforce justice and unlike smart contracts, their orders are backed by men and women with dogs and guns.
Put another way: a court will not say "gee, gosh, if only ETH had a mechanism I could give orders for! I guess I'm beaten". They will instead say "you owe $X and I will seize all assets you have today, or will ever possess in future, in order to pay that debt". And when it turns out that people thought they were clever by evading the court order by keeping everything in a coin, they will then learn that ethereum can't buy top bunk at the federal penitentiary if you don't have access to a computer.