Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Poll: Is Bitcoin a weapon or speech?
by
hatshepsut93
on 28/11/2022, 17:41:08 UTC
Gigi argues that Bitcoin is speech because we can roll some dice or flip a coin to get our private key. We can then convert that key into a secret “phrase”. So creating and writing down the private key is speech. To make this action illegal is essentially restricting our freedom of speech and thought.

It's a stupid argument for a few reasons. First, Bitcoin is not just a private key, it's the whole software and the network. And a ban on Bitcoin wouldn't look like a ban on running software, no one will bother with enforcing that, instead Bitcoin-related operations will be banned - exchanging it for fiat, using it as a payment method, etc. If these bans are enforced, then Bitcoin would be nothing more than a record in a database with no utility.

And second, this is just a version of the reductive argument that information is just a number and you can't outlaw a number.