Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Topic OP
Pill: Is Bitcoin a weapon or speech?
by
BTCapsule
on 27/11/2022, 07:41:23 UTC
There is an ongoing battle on Bitcoin Twitter about whether Bitcoin should be considered a weapon (and protected by the Second Amendment in the US) or speech (and protected by the First Amendment in the US).

The legal precedent is that encryption is a munition in the United States, and therefore protected by the Second Amendment. During the Crypto Wars of the 90’s, cypherpunk Adam Back made a ridicule of this by creating a t-shirt with an RSA-encrypted message on the back, making it illegal to export or show this shirt to non-US citizen.

….

My thoughts:

Bitcoin is speech. I have no desire to see Bitcoin adopted by governments, especially the United States. In the United States, citizens are not allowed to possess the same weapons that the US government can possess. As a monetary system, miners would be a threat to the US if they were to get enough hashing power to commit a 51% attack. This could lead the US to classify mining as a weapon of mutual mass destruction, and therefore, after much propaganda, they could take State control of the miners in order to “protect us from China and Russia” or “secure the network”.

While I can understand an analogy of Bitcoin being a protective weapon against fiat, I see no purpose in getting legal precedence for this. The government can twist things into incoherence. They still classify tomatoes as a vegetable for tax purposes. Their legal opinions are irrelevant to reality.

What do you think? Is Bitcoin a weapon, or speech?