tl;dr
During a recent panel discussion at the BUIDL Asia summit, panelists debated the best approach to dealing with the problem of racist meme coins, which have recently exploded onto the scene. Some suggested that wallet apps and decentralized exchanges should screen out banned words, while others argue...
During a recent panel discussion at the BUIDL Asia summit, panelists debated the best approach to dealing with the problem of racist meme coins, which have recently exploded onto the scene. Some suggested that wallet apps and decentralized exchanges should screen out banned words, while others argued that nodes have a duty to stop these tokens dead in their tracks. The debate touched on the freedom of choice for wallet developers to institute block lists, as well as the legal obligations of ISPs in different countries to filter certain content. The discussion highlighted the tension between supporting free speech and censorship resistance in the blockchain world, and the legal obligations imposed by certain authorities. Despite the attention racist meme coins have drawn, some participants pointed out that they are minuscule in comparison to the overall scale of cryptocurrency.
As funny and irreverent as meme coins are, the category also has a problem with an explosion of tokens with names containing the N-word and other racist themes. During a panel discussion on meme coins at the recent BUIDL Asia summit in Seoul, panelists debated how to deal with the problem. Should wallet apps and decentralized exchanges screen out banned words? Or do the nodes have a duty to stop these tokens dead in their tracks? "Choice means the right for a wallet developer to institute a block list," Austin Federa, the Solana Foundation's head of strategy, said during the panel. "Almost every wallet in every ecosystem filters out spam NFTs and spam tokens. Users always have the ability to reveal something if they want to, but the core network needs to remain permissionless." Federa made an analogy to the internet: It's unreasonable to expect an internet service provider (ISP) to filter out content that some might find offensive, he said. After all, the internet, like crypto, operates on a largely permissionless basis.
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