NEAR INTENTS SAYS SHIELD CAUGHT MORE THAN $50 MILLION OF BITGET’S STOLEN FUNDS AND FROZE $503,000 MID-EXECUTION — ALEX SHEVCHENKO WROTE THAT PERMISSIONLESS DOES NOT MEAN NEUTRAL — THORCHAIN GAVE THE OPPOSITE ANSWER TWO DAYS EARLIER

Near Intents watched more than fifty million dollars of stolen money try to pass through it and stopped nearly all of it. Then Alex Shevchenko wrote down why, and the why is the part that matters. He said permissionless does not mean neutral.

He is right that it does not. A protocol has operators and operators choose. But what he is describing is a policy, and a policy can be pointed at anyone. Today it points at a thief. The machinery that lets it point at a thief is the same machinery that lets it point at you, and the only thing standing between those two uses is the judgment of the people running it.

THORChain looked at the same stolen coins and gave the opposite answer. It said a network halt is an emergency mechanism to protect the protocol and is not a selective freeze of specific funds. One network drew a boundary. One refused to. Both still call themselves permissionless.

Bitcoin never had to settle this argument, because there is no one at the base layer positioned to settle it. That is not restraint and it is not virtue. It is what having no operator means. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $83,136.