Code is law applies at least to the flow of money - unlike USD, the court can’t do something like garnish your wages to pay back a 10M settlement by taking some crypto out of your incoming transactions, both due to the anonymity and cryptographic parts of the concept. Of course, they could simply throw you in jail (civil contempt of court), but you still keep your money in that scenario.

They can order you to give back the money.

And like in real life, you can refuse to tell where the money is hidden.

Also like in real life, you might have spent the money.

Or lost it day trading.

Comments like this make me think we software engineers live in a different world.

>unlike USD, the court can’t do something like garnish your wages to pay back a 10M settlement by taking some crypto out of your incoming transactions

You think so, do you? "The law is the because that's what the law says it is". It might not be possible now (and I'm not sure I believe that, you can garnish foreign wages) but it will be if the need arises.

"But the code" yeah, no, that's a silly argument that only applies to cyberspace and not the physical world you occupy

It's 'legally' possible in that the court can say that you have to pay back some amount of crypto or some amount of USD, but with crypto it's not something that they can enforce in reality if the debtor doesn't cooperate. I'm saying the court can't force incoming transactions to be 60/40 split with 40% going to a different party, and the anonymity part of crypto means you can create a new wallet whenever you want to get paid without the court even knowing that you are receiving crypto as payment.

> and the anonymity part of crypto means you can create a new wallet whenever you want to get paid without the court even knowing that you are receiving crypto as payment.

Yeah, and if you get paid in cash you can keep it secret to.

OTOH, if your lifestyle reveals you have access go and are spending funds and not making required payments, courts can impose other consequences, up to and including imprisonment. But usually, seizing and selling off physical or reachable intangible property would be the first way to handle monetary debts. And, sure, crypto itself may be easy to conceal, but if you can’t use it to acquire anything tangible without sacrificing the safety, is it really usefully safe?

Didn't the US government just drain the crypto accounts of some online hacker collective that ransomwared that petrol pipeline?

Also the verb is "garnisheed". They're not putting parsely on it :)

> Also the verb is "garnisheed".

No, its “garnish”, past-tense “garnished”.

> They're not putting parsely on it :)

No, but its the exact same verb, just a different sense.

No it's not, the word is garnishee

“garnishee” is the noun for the person subject to the garnishment (that is, the person owing/controlling money to/of the debtor whose held funds or payments are redirected from the debtor to the creditor); the verb for imposing the garnishment is “garnish”, and in the past tense “garnished” not “garnisheed”.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/garnishee

my reading of the code is law idea is that the code determines what is possible in the system, in this theory you can say that the law which code represents in more ironclad than most laws (at least common law) however this reading, which I thought was the default one, does not take into account bugs occurring in code or that people may not have thought rigorously enough to prevent people from doing not what the law intends but also what the code allows.