Bitcoin is a distributed ledger system, maintained by a network of peers that monitors and regulates which entries are allocated to what Bitcoin addresses. This is done entirely by transmitting messages that are text, between the computers in the network (known as “nodes”), where cryptographic procedures are executed on these messages in text to verify their authenticity and the identity of the sender and recipient of the message and their position in the public ledger. The messages sent between nodes in the Bitcoin network are human readable, and printable. There is no point in any Bitcoin transaction that Bitcoin ceases to be text. It is all text, all the time.
Bitcoin can be printed out onto sheets of paper. This output can take different forms, like machine readable QR Codes, or it can be printed out in the letters A to Z, a to z and 0 to 9. This means they can be read by a human being, just like “Huckleberry Finn”.
At the time of the creation of the United States of America, the Founding Fathers of that new country in their deep wisdom and distaste for tyranny, haunted by the memory of the absence of a free press in the countries from which they escaped, wrote into the basic law of that then young federation of free states, an explicit and unambiguous freedom, the “Freedom of the Press”. This amendment was first because of its central importance to a free society. The First Amendment guarantees that all Americans have the power to exercise their right to publish and distribute anything they like, without restriction or prior restraint.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. This single line, forever precludes any law that restricts Bitcoin in any way.
So Crypto is unironically guaranteed through the first amendment.... Can anyone refute this?
Yeah, I mean, even basic copyright laws clearly debunk the theory that "The First Amendment guarantees that all Americans have the power to exercise their right to publish and distribute anything they like, without restriction or prior restraint.".
Cooper Miller
>implying the constitution matters anymore
Nathan Rivera
"Copyright gives the generator of these texts privileges under the law imposing fines on someone copying your message without your permission, but that law has nothing to do with exporting or imposing a tax on the messages themselves, and of course, forbidding the copying of your Bitcoin payment message rather negates the purpose of using Bitcoin"
Nolan Jones
"Taking all of this into account, if any legislator, regulator, three or six letter US agency or other bureaucrat dares to try and regulate Bitcoin, they will be on a hiding to nothing. A legal challenge will be mounted, and will have to be mounted, because if the State can legislate against a single piece of software that generates messages, a legal precedent will be created allowing the US government to regulate all software no matter what it does.
Bitcoin’s operation is fundamentally no different to what all email, text messaging and internet connected software does; relay messages. The only difference is in the software that tracks how the messages of the sender and recipient relate to each other. Email is no different to Bitcoin, save for the fact that a record of the sender and recipient and content of your email is not stored in a public ledger one against the other"
Hudson Lee
lol why doesn’t the right to a free press let me print my own dollar bills?
Kayden Bennett
You can print your own money, just like monopoly
Blake Bennett
What a long essay of nothing. Watch them regulate it.
Kayden Wood
Regulate it? no. But ordering a 90% tax and requiring you to register with the SEC? that is legal, and that IS COMING.
Yeah but if I print money that looks just like real money, I go to jail. That’s unconstitutional!
Aaron Wilson
look up Executive Order 6102
they could just pass a law outlawing Bitcoin (and there is a constitutional precedent for this) and arrest node operators/shut down exchanges. in a day the price would be $0, and suddenly no one would be interested in it anymore.
Brody Lee
Well no shit dude that's counterfeiting
Pretty lame argument if that's the best you got
Ethan Harris
I think more EURO's own crypto than US people.
Jeremiah Myers
It can destroy it's market value easily. By heavily penalizing exchanges for example.
Nathaniel Sullivan
Bernstein v. US Department of Justice:
established that code is speech and is protected by the First Amendment. This absolutely and unambiguously applies to Bitcoin, with eerie parallels to KYC/AML in Bitcoin. The unconstitutional ITAR requirements are exactly the same as asking Bitcoin traders to register as “Money Transmitters” and seek licenses before they can be paid to transmit text to the Bitcoin network for publication on the public ledger. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found in Bernstein’s favour, and ruled that software was speech protected by the First Amendment and that the government’s regulations preventing its publication were unconstitutional. It is clear to see that Bitcoin falls squarely into the category of protected speech, there is no way around any of this, and the US courts must come to the same conclusion for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is protected speech, and the case law says so explicitly.
Dylan Johnson
Regulating exchanges isn't exactly the same as regulating bitcoin itself
Jack James
OP is full of shit. The argument of his image is that crypto is a publication, and therefore covered under "unlimited free speech".
Two problems with that....
1. Free speech isn't unlimited, even in America
2. Printing or publishing isn't unlimited either.
For example, if I "print" a document that looks a lot like a $100 bill, trust me, my first amendment argument isn't going to work.
Coiners should WANT at least a little regulation. The lack of regulation is what's killing the whole concept.
Jackson Foster
Again, counterfeiting is not protected by the first amendment, nor is copying a 100 bill a unique original thought communicatable to others
It's just fraud with a deceitful intention behind it = illegal anyways
