Stripe is an American company. Why should Iranians be bared from participating in the decentralized web?
Things to think about: how does this prevent embargos? If you’re in the US, any means of doing business with someone on the watchlist is a legal hazard. If you’re in a country which doesn’t follow that, you have other options. Changing the tech doesn’t change the law.
As for alleged censor-resistance, consider what happens when major exchanges are required to follow the laws. Coins become tainted once they’ve been used for illegal transactions, reducing both the number of potential buyers dramatically and how much they’re willing to pay. Miners in countries party to international agreements may even refuse to process them. The fact that the first transaction couldn’t be blocked doesn’t mean everyone’s just giving up.
I put “hack” in quotes because at the time the community loudly was proclaiming “code is law” and if you accept that the person accused of hacking didn’t break any “laws” of the DAO…he simply used it according to the code published in the smart contract. The community decided to hard fork, change the rules and censor his transaction.
You could make the same argument that was censorship in bitcoin had a transaction been made that exploited the inflation bug before the fix was pushed out: https://bitcoincore.org/en/2018/09/20/notice/
It also likely would not be possible today, see the Parity hack in 2017, which lost people close to the Ethereum foundation a 9 figures amount, but didn't get forked away even though they tried.
https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-c...
The US can't prevent Wikileaks from receiving Bitcoin donations, for instance. They can punish one of their citizen who sent Wikileaks money, but not take the money back.
