You can't sue Core developers who have no control over what the bitcoin community chooses to use
as a new client to cause a PoW change, in the event of an attack from miners on a minority chain.
If anything, the purposeful attack on the minority chain could be argued to be a form of torturous
interference for the exchanges and users who choose to still conduct business on it. So, the only
true legal liability here is against mining businesses who choose to participate in a chain attack.
If the miners choose to split off onto their own chain, and then choose to attack the minority chain,
that would be seen as very malicious action by the Court systems. There is no legal justification to
destroy the old chain. The Court will determine that to be a form of financial theft. If the miners let
the minority chain die on its own, there is to problem.
Miners should be aware of the laws within different countries before they declare legal action that
would ultimately be seen as frivolous. They will need to also name all the new client node operators
who chose to run this PoW change software as defendants.
thinking core cannot be blamed is like thinking a passenger in a drive-by cannot be an accessory..
its easy to spot who allows and disallows bips/issues to be active or thrown out without a second thought. it certainly isnt "the community"
its easy to spot who implements the commits.
its easy to spot who ACK's the commits
its easy to spot.
then there are the obvious blockstream employed devs and all thier connections.
why do you think gmaxwell handed over the reigns of the Bip moderation to Luke..
why matt corrallo jumped ship to chaincode.
they know they are screwed and trying to pre-empt themselves to try playing the victim card. when they are the perpetrators
come on face it.
throw out dynamic proposals because it might cause some orphan drama or a split... but include security breaking nuke in the form of a PoW algo change..
even logic see's the stupidity of that
Under the law in most western jurisdictions, you will not be able to find voluntary
developers liable for the actions of the Community. Blockstream as a business is a
different issue, but for them to circumvent this, they would just not participate in
any of the processes of this "grass root group" creating a new client that "changes
the PoW on an attacked minority chain".
I would presume that if such a client is created and used, it would be built by anon
developers and not done on the CORE github directly.
Ultimately, the legal aspects are very complicated and if your legal action against Core
developers was successful than all that it would prove is that Bitcoin with it separate
decentralized structures designed to resist different attacks (including legal suits) failed.
That would prove that Bitcoin is currently regulatable and no person would willingly work
on Bitcoin code since it would open them up to liabilities. That would be very sad for
open-source software projects and would create new precedent, IMO.
You can not blame or find parties responsible for damages unless you prove it.
Since Bitcoin is a voluntary system with no responsible authority who grants user or etc any
rights, the proposed suit would be a hard case to prove and would be a waste of money.
My only point is that all parties should keep the law out of this, because then you open a
pandora's box, that I don't think this community is ready to deal with, especially if it goes
the wrong way. One party will not be hurt here, but most likely the whole community. A
suit against voluntary developers is different than a suit against a defunct exchange like Mt.Gox.