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> There's plenty of sites that operate entirely within the US and it's trivial to hard block everyone else.

It's trivial to block IP addresses listed as being somewhere else. That doesn't block people in other jurisdictions from using a US IP address, either by renting or compromising one in the US or having administrative control over one somewhere else and then setting its metadata to whatever they want.

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Well yes but once you're in the US someone owns the machine you're getting hit by and you can make them take it down. People won't just throw their hands up "well the operator isn't in the US nothing can be done", they'll just make DigitalOcean block them.
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> Well yes but once you're in the US someone owns the machine you're getting hit by and you can make them take it down.

That's not how you get to high trust, since it requires the opposite -- you'd have to ID everyone and ban VPNs and restrict access to general purpose computers lest any fall under the control of a dastardly foreigner etc.

You can't build a high trust society inside of a police state because a high trust society is one where people do the right thing when no one is holding a gun to their head and a police state is holding a gun to your head.

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> they'll just make DigitalOcean block them

Residential proxy. Most cloud providers are blocked or already on reputation watch lists.

A few thousand people downloading a “free vpn” app on their phone is all you need to be back up and running. They get a useful vpn in exchange for letting others borrow their IP.

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