THORChain Defends Network Pause as Emergency Safety Mechanism, Not Selective Freeze

THORChain is drawing a line between a protocol-wide halt and targeted censorship, which matters because permissionless design leaves no mechanism to blacklist an attacker even after a multi-million-dollar drain. The claim that the attacker's addresses were never blocked is the project's core defense, but it also exposes the trade-off: the same architecture that resists censorship cannot selectively stop a known exploiter. The open question is whether the network's emergency pause is judged as a safety tool or as an admission that permissionless systems have no middle ground between full halt and full access.