Possession, as they say, is nine tenths of the law. If you own something, it is yours, and thus you can do with it as you please.

Here's where a lot of the legal analysis about the Binance coup goes wrong. You don't have possession of money in a bank account. It can be frozen, seized or given a 'haircut' for a number of reasons, often without a warrant or court order.

How does this translate to magic internet money? Ownership is determined by consensus. I was opposed to Ethereum invalidating the DAO hacker's balance, because the founding principle was 'code is law'. The same goes for Bitcoin. Both have validating nodes that limit the power of miners (how much is a topic of debate).

On the other hand, Steem is not based on 'code is law'. Witnesses have the full power to accept or reject transactions. That's exactly why it's so dangerous to have one party run all the witness nodes. And limits on Steemit's stake were already in the code without being implemented. It was a danger, but on balance, it was used to develop and promote Steem rather than to end it. And it was a protection against the kind of collusion we've seen on Lisk and EOS.

Anyway, Sun didn't file a court case, he retaliated. And by doing that, he proved our fears were well-founded. Remember that he recently used his founder's stake to vote for Tron validators.