Yes, if you actively and knowing break the law, you might get punished for it. Not sure what's new here? If you don't want to connect to North Korea, block connections coming from North Korea, it's like one or two commands of iptables.
The sanctions go a little bit further than that though. Financial institutions are not merely blocked from accepting transactions from the IP region of North Korea, but actually from doing business with a whole list of companies and individuals with ties to NK. To comply with the sanctions regulation you would need to have a lookup service listing the owner of every wallet and for every transaction you validate, check if any of the wallets involved belongs to a sanctioned company or individual.
I don't think "but I didn't know that it was a NK wallet!" is going to hold up in court either. There are laws regulating the minimum Know-Your-Customer a money transmitting company needs to perform and when the regulators come knocking you need to be able to show your procedures for that and how they lead to compliance with the law.
The real question is whether courts will rule that POS validators are "money transmitters" in a legal sense. To me it's kinda obvious that they are, since without the action of the validators no money would get transmitted. No doubt there will be much water under the bridge before that gets settled though.
> The first ruling states that, to the extent a user creates or “mines” a
> convertible virtual currency solely for a user’s own purposes, the user
> is not a money transmitter under the BSA.
That seems to leave rather a lot of open space IMO. For example, does a POS validator create convertible virtual currency? Clearly. But is it solely for their own purposes? Do they become a money transmitter as soon as they sell their crypto? Also, only part of miner income is the block reward; there are transaction fees as well. Is a miner allowed to accept fees from sanctioned individuals for providing payment validation services?
2014 was forever ago in crypto terms of course, so I can imagine that the viewpoints of regulators have evolved together with the technology.
It probably seems unclear to you because you are not familiar with the industry and/or AML regulations. To answer your questions, cryptocurrency miners are not money transmitters, even if they sell their cryptocurrency and they can accept fees from any transactions.
Of course regulations can change, but in this case it seems unlikely unless the intention is to effectively "ban" cryptocurrency.
I didn't get the sense that WJW is unfamiliar with the industry. I read their comment as suggesting that the administrators who designed the existing regulations did so at a time when the widely understood definition of "miner" was a proof-of-work miner. If the same regulations were drafted today, would PoS validator nodes be considered functionally equivalent to PoW miner nodes? I hope not, since they aren't.
Regulations can and do change. Cryptocurrency fanatics are expanding their regulatory capture with various senators and state governments friendly to the 'movement.' I worry about the next crypto crash tanking the economy after this crypto crash.
What I'm saying here is that this system is designed to tax your staked ETH if you do that. So you have three choices: 1: Run a validator blocking NK transactions, safe in the knowledge it's probably legal, but your staked ETH is slowly going to taxed by the network costing you money. 2: Run a validator including the NK transactions, your staked ETH is safe, but you are violating your countries money laundering laws most likely. 3: Don't run a validator, now the only people running ETH validator nodes are those who work with North Korean money launderers, which doesn't seem like a particularly stable footing for Ethereum.
Ignorance of the law is not a valid defense. It might get you a lighter sentience, but don't count on that. You are expected to know all the laws that apply to all the activities you do.
