Sunday I found myself in the familiar situation of trying to reach Max Fisch and finding the site down. It was 95% that it was again the system administration to blame, but what if the site was closed? Would there be a warning? Would we know about it? Is there a way to prevent that?

After seeing business after business taken down or disappearing is there any strategy other than hope possible?

Well the good news is that there is, but it is complicated. Last week for the first time a business showed how to do it and I want to show you the blueprint.

It is a little difficult to understand because it involves cryptos. Most of the times you trade cryptos at a fiat exchange like Coinbase to buy bitcoin with dollars, at a crypto exchange to trade cryptos against bitcoins or each other or at some decentralized networks (Defi) like Uniswap where some tokens can be traded with each other, in an anonymous way.

Many cryptos have their own blockchain which is a distributed ledger with many nodes. Each node is equal, the network is decentralized and there is no central authority responsible for the content or activity on the network; which is why no government can control a strong crypto.

Finally many cryptos are governed by a DAO or decentralized autonomous organization. Each crypto makes its own rules, and usually the holders of the cryptos can vote for the governance of the DAO.

After this long introduction here is the story: https://finance.yahoo.com/video/why-crypto-exchange-company-shapeshift-171015954.html. Shapeshift was a very popular application which allowed people to exchange cryptos against each other in their wallet without going to any exchange.

This is an interview with the CEO of Shapeshift. Shapeshift was popular, successful and loved. It allowed simple anonymous transfers. But what the CEO feared happened, the government decreed that Shapeshift is a bank, and forced it to do bank tricks against its customers, like AML and KYC, in other words it had to spy on its users. Shapeshift had no recourse because it was an American company with a known location and property (servers).

In order to prevent this, the CEO decided to dissolve the corporate structure, and to establish a DAO instead. He created a new token Fox, he gave it to his users, and all the holders of Fox can participate in the governance of the DAO. The assets of the company are owned by the DAO, the DAO is not national and no government can dictate what it has to do.

This is the recipe. How could we do something like that? Locate multiple redundant servers in different countries. Place our forums and other thinks we like, for instance Backpage on these servers. Establish a white paper with our rules. Use or make a token to be a piece of ownership to these assets. Make a DAO to govern these assets. At this point nobody can close the sites.

I expect this structure and maneuver to become more common in the future.

Incompetence is not the same as Censorship.

I operated systems that had a penalty of $250 Million if offline when they were needed.

Most of my time was trying to keep the morons hired by IBM from mucking things up.

C123

Chuck, at least one of us does not understand what the other is saying. Maybe it's me.

Shapeshift allowed any user to change a crypto from his wallet let's say Ether, to another let's say Dogecoin. This was convenient and anonymous. Without Shapeshift the user would have to create an exchange account which is laborious, time consuming and forces you to prove the identity. Then he would have had to transfer the Ether to the exchange, make a transaction to buy Dogecoin with it, then transfer the Dogecoin back to his wallet.

Shapeshift allowed him to do all this immediately and anonymously. Then the government forced Shapeshift to enforce KYC (know your customer) ie collect identity information for its users. Lots of users did not like that and left Shapeshift. By becoming a DAO Shapeshift could not be forced to enforce KYC, and its users could use it like before.

Plus the new token, Fox, will appreciate and pay for future development and operations.

OK My bad!