Why America Can’t Regulate Bitcoin
Hearings on Bitcoin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CCqCsmCDdw) and its derivatives are being held in the USA on a regular basis, and invariably the expert witnesses fail to properly describe the actual processes going on. If they used the correct language and excluded all analogies, the only possible conclusion would be that America cannot regulate Bitcoin under its current legal system. The Constitution guarantees the inalienable rights of American citizens, and therefore Bitcoin is a protected by virtue of it being a form of publishing text. The only way Bitcoin can be made regulable is if the Constitution is changed; and that does not mean adding a new Amendment, it means removing the First Amendment entirely.
Inevitably the anti-Bitcoin protagonists will face a robust and ultimately successful legal challenge that will remove the possibility of any sort of “BitLicense” or interference from the CTFC, FinCEN or any other agency. It will also remove any possibility of interference at the State level. The consequence of adhering to the basic law of the United States will cause America to become the centre of all Bitcoin business for the entire world, and will cause trillions of dollars worth of eCommerce to flow through the USA.
Let me explain why this is the case.
Some say that Bitcoin is money. Others say that it is not money. It doesn’t matter. What does matter are three things; that Bitcoin is, that the Bitcoin network does what it is meant to do completely reliably, and what the true nature of the Bitcoin network and the messages in it are.
Bitcoin is a database, 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.
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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.
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This single line, forever precludes any law that restricts Bitcoin in any way.
In 1995, the US Government had on the statute books, laws that restrict the export of encryption software products from America without a license. These goods are classified as “munitions”. The first versions of the breakthrough Public Key Encryption software “Pretty Good Privacy” or “PGP”, written by Philip Zimmerman had already escaped the USA via Bulletin Board Systems from the moment it was first distributed, but all copies of PGP outside of the United States were “illegal”. In order to fix the problem of all copies of PGP outside of America being encumbered by this perception, an ingenious plan was put into motion, using the first Amendment as the means of making it happen legally.
The source code for PGP was printed out. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_investigation)
The original print out of the PGP source code.
It’s as simple as that. Once the source code for PGP was printed in book form, it instantly and more importantly, unambiguously, fell under the protection of the First Amendment. As a binary, the US government ridiculously tries to assert that immaterial software is a device, and not text (software or “binaries” is text that can be run on devices). Clearly the idea that software is a device is patently absurd, but rather than waste money arguing this point in court, printing out PGP removed all doubt that a First Amendment act was taking place.
The printed source code was shipped to another country, perfectly legally and beyond challenge, and then transferred to a machine by OCR (Optical Character Recognition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition), a software tool that can turn a printed page into a text file, removing the need for a person to manually type out a printed page), resulting in a PGP executable that was legally exported from the United States.
The direct analogy to Bitcoin should be vividly clear to you now. PGP and Bitcoin are both:
1. Pieces of software that can be rendered as printed text on paper
2. Software that generates unique blocks of human readable text
3. Designed to generate text that is 100% covered by the First Amendment
The purpose of PGP is to absolutely verify the identity of the sender of a message and ensure that the message was not read or changed in transit. The purpose of Bitcoin is to absolutely verify the ability of the owner of a cryptographic key (which is a block of text) that can unlock a ledger entry in the global Bitcoin network. Both of these pieces of software are messaging systems and services that absolutely fall under the First Amendment in every aspect, from the source code used to generate the software clients that do the message signing to the text the compiled clients generate, send, receive and process.
Bitcoin is text. Bitcoin is speech. It cannot be regulated in a free country like the USA with guaranteed inalienable rights and a First Amendment that explicitly excludes the act of publishing from government oversight.
Bitcoin and PGP generate messages that are initiated by their users. Each of the messages that are generated by these two pieces of software are unique. The only bodies of law that could possibly be invoked regarding their output and source code are Copyright and Patent law respectively. The Bitcoin source is not copyrighted and the core idea of it is not Patented, and in any case, none of this has anything to do with the nature of Bitcoin messages, or your right to publish. Typewriters can include Patented methods in their construction, and those Patents have no bearing on your First Amendment right to publish what you create with a Patented tool.
Copyright gives the generator of these texts privileges under the law imposing fines on someone copying your message without your permission, but Copyright law has nothing to do with exporting, regulating 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.
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 (https://t.co/HfGxuOmyt6), 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. We know it’s stored in a private database, but that’s another story. Wink wink.
Here is another example (https://www.eff.org/cases/bernstein-v-us-dept-justice ) of case law proving that this reasoning is correct.
In Bernstein v. US Department of Justice it was 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.
The position that Bitcoin is money is fundamentally wrong, and systems like it have existed for many years without gaining the attention of any three letter agencies. Take for example FarmVille, the massively popular farm simulation game on Facebook.
This hugely popular game is no different to Bitcoin in nature. FarmBucks exist in a closed system, just as Bitcoin does. The only difference is the size of the space where the messages are being sent, and in the case of FarmBucks, the number of users and transactions (messages sent) was large. FarmVille had 83,760,000 monthly active users and not a single one was subjected to KYC/AML to exchange fiat for FarmBucks or FarmCash. Why not? What happened to that money? Why weren’t FinCEN or SEC all over that game as they are on ICOs? No one can explain this adequately. This example is very useful as a tool to pull back the curtain on the people who assert that Bitcoin is a money and is fundamentally different to a money kept in a game. All the rationales they use (mostly in the form of run on sentences) to explain the difference are inaccurate, and never address the fundamental processes; if they did, they would have no choice but to conclude that Bitcoin is no more subject to regulation than FarmBucks or PGP are.
Clearly, allowing legislation to touch Bitcoin means that any software of any kind will suddenly be liable to arbitrary and unconstitutional restriction. It will set a precedent that will be devastating to all software development in the USA, and software is the means by which everything is run, communicated, exchanged and ordered in modern society. In fact, it is impossible to run a modern society without software.
Twitter for example, could find itself being regulated; it transmits messages that are no different in nature to the messages that Bitcoin transmits; the only difference being the publicly maintained ledger and application of the messages. In fact, twitter could turn itself into a Bitcoin company quite easily by adding a few fields to its message JSON schema (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON#Example) to include a Bitcoin address for each of its users, adding a page to its client and running its own Bitcoin server pool. Would that extra text suddenly transform Twitter into a bank? Would that suddenly change the nature of each Tweet that is sent on their network, and cause them to be “Money Transmitters”? How is having a Bitcoin address integrated into your Twitter account different to making a promise by hand on Twitter to your followers or in a direct message?
Essentially, Bitcoin allows you to make written contracts with people without knowing them or signing paper; the network and software takes care of identifying and fulfilling the promise, all with cryptographically signed pieces of text. What the people calling for “BitLicenses” are asserting is that because Bitcoin right now has a particular use, it should be exempted from the basic law of the United States of America. That is completely insane, and will have unintended consequences that would be absolutely disastrous for the American economy since almost everything today is mediated by or touches software.
On the other hand, if Bitcoin is left to flourish and the market allowed to define the services, means of setting the value and resolving disputes, Bitcoin as an ecosystem will be extremely robust and widespread, just like the Internet is today, after having grown for twenty years without any regulation or oversight from the State.
Furthermore, as I have said previously, the country that does not enact Bitcoin legislation will become the starting and endpoints of all Bitcoin transactions globally by first mover advantage (https://hackernoon.com/our-submission-to-the-british-governments-digital-currencies-call-for-information-160fbf103bbc). All other jurisdictions will see Bitcoin passing through them untaxed, and there will be nothing they can do about it, as Bitcoin is an unassailable peer to peer network.
We have seen a similar phenomenon with the legal position of encryption in France. SSL was regulated in France until Dominique Strauss-Khan, former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, removed the restrictions (http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/01/15/france_to_end_severe_encryption/). They knew that “French e-commerce” would take place inside “le pays Roosbeef” if it were not possible to secure French websites with SSL on demand without friction. American Bitcoin businesses (since the endpoints will be in their jurisdiction) will be taxed on their profits, and this will be a percentage of the trillions of global transactions made on the network for every conceivable and inconceivable purpose.
The same is true for any other country. The United States looks set to cripple itself by enacting “BitLicenses” and declaring by fiat that Bitcoin is a currency, or a commodity or legal tender. As I describe above, Bitcoin is none of those things by nature, and the myriad number of applications it can be put to is only just being discovered. Our project Azteco is but one of them, with the potential to reach the billions of unbanked people in the world, and provide them with an easy way to access internet e-commerce, world-wide, with a system that makes payment fraud impossible. The potential benefit to the unbanked and the websites that sell goods on-line and the jurisdictions where those websites operate is without precedent. Only a fool would do something that could harm the advent of this transformation, or shun this new technology and the business building on it.
No legislature will be able to keep up with the advances in software that are taking place; there are too many developers and efficient tools in the wild all over the world, all with equal access to the market. The best the State can possibly hope for is to tax new businesses that use the new tools as they emerge, and encourage entrepreneurs to incorporate in their jurisdictions. If America wants to drive away Bitcoin developers, exchanges and new businesses, by all means, do so and take the consequences. There are many other places in the world where fast internet pipes have been laid and where the government is not so backward. Skype was founded in Estonia, not Silicon Valley, and this is for a reason. All the big Bitcoin exchanges are outside of the USA. There is a reason for that. No one wanting to start a Bitcoin business is planning to move to New York from anywhere, because they know that their business models will immediately come under attack.
For those of you who are frightened of a free market in Bitcoin, rest assured, all the laws that currently exist to do with fraud, theft, misrepresentation and everything else, continue to apply to all people and corporations who use Bitcoin. Bitcoin does not make laws or your personal or corporate obligations moot. When you deal with a company, you retain access to the law and recourse to it. When someone makes a promise to sell you goods with Bitcoin, that promise is not nullified because you are paying with Bitcoin. Good Bitcoin businesses will build dispute resolution systems the way that eBay and Amazon have, so that you never have to go to court to obtain justice if there is a problem. Online, reputation is everything, and bad reputations can destroy your credibility and customer base over night. This is a far more powerful incentive to behave correctly and fulfil promises, which most people do by default in any case, rather than some arbitrary and absurd “BitLicense”.
All the “BitLicenses” in the world could not stop MTGox from having a software problem, and no law can bring back the money lost either directly or through the disruption the event caused by the software error. Once again, entrepreneurs powered by the Internet make life easier and better, not laws and regulations. Regulation does not make software correct; developers do.
I have one recommendation for anyone advocating that there should be a “BitLicense”. Don’t waste everyone’s time, money and resources proposing this anti-American idea. The EFF has better things to do with their time than teach the PGP “Munitions Case” lesson all over again. If it goes to court, your side will lose, and as a consequence, America will lose its head start as all Bitcoin entrepreneurs flee the USA for environments that will allow them to innovate, grow and prosper.
And what can the business people who want a “BitLicense” forced on the software industry say? That they don’t trust themselves? That’s patently absurd. That they do not trust their competitors? If it’s the case that their competitors are not good actors, then the good actors have a market advantage, and remember; a license cannot protect the public from fraud or provide any guarantee of any kind, it can only distort the market.
What these “BitLicense” advocates actually want is a guaranteed market advantage. They are Crony Capitalists. They want to prevent the emergence of a “Golden BB” entrepreneur that might destroy their business, they want to slow down and stifle innovation, so that they can become the entrenched and unassailable gatekeepers. They want to bar new entrants to the market. It simply will not work. And it’s un-American.
The American legislature must let the American dream flourish and extend its power to Bitcoin, or it will be compelled to obey the law, and this has started to happen. Two judges in the USA have now found that Bitcoin is not money, and have thrown out “Money Laundering” charges against two men:
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U.S. Magistrate Judge Hugh B. Scott ruled in a money laundering case in Buffalo, N.Y. that bitcoin is more like a commodity and is not a form of currency, according to a local news report.
He recommended the money laundering charge be dropped against the defendant since bitcoin isn’t money.
In another money laundering case last year, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Teresa Mary Pooler stated it is very clear, even to someone with limited knowledge in the area, that bitcoin has a long way to go before it is the equivalent of money.
Archive: https://archive.is/pKQJ2
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Bitcoin is not money. KYC/AML should not apply to it at all. The Hugh B. Scott ruling is highly significant, because it directly contradicts the idea of BitLicence. And lest there be any doubt, all of this, including legal remedies for breach of promise, applies to “ICOs”, which are also nothing more than text stored in a database. The fact that they are called, “Initial Coin Offerings” is irrelevant to the underlying processes, and it is not illegal to parrot the language and terms of finance, which are not trademarked or copyrighted. The Hollywood Stock Exchange wasn't deceptive because it called itself a “Stock Exchange”. Opponents of Bitcoin and ICOs have no good arguments, and the threadbare pretexts for regulation they’re able to synthesize are as flimsy as fiat.
Listen to this piece read out by a real person (https://anchor.fm/thecryptoconomy/episodes/CryptoQuikRead_260---Why-America-Cant-Regulate-Bitcoin-e4b4s8/a-ah3bvg) on The Cryptoconomy Podcast.
Read this article in Spanish (https://sovrnbitcoiner.com/por-que-estados-unidos-no-puede-regular-bitcoin/). Translated by Wave @insatwetrust.
Many years ago, a despicable little pipsqueak trumpeted that they'd "Won" by getting Bitcoin "recognised" by a legislator, after years of lobbying for new rules.
No one anointed this runt to do this job. They took it upon themselves to poison the legislature.
Now, as a direct result of this imbecile's action, doing business is harder than it would have been had he kept his stupid mouth shut.
Now the same people are trying to pivot to being the champions of freedom, having forged the chains that now bind them and other actually innocent people, and contaminate the business landscape.
We remember what you did.
We do not forgive. We do not forget.
You're still a tie wearing normie underneath.
WE SEE YOU.
Slowly but surely, Lummis & Co. are starting to get it, but they’re not anywhere near close enough to fulfilling their oaths.
First of all, there is no such thing as a “Crypto Asset” this is a portmanteau a made up phrase borne of backward analogies computer illiterates have constructed to give their arguments form.
As soon as anyone says the phrase "Crypto Assets", you know you’re dealing with an ignoramus, in the strict Latin sense of that word: “Know Nothing”.
Users who have control over private keys do not have “custody” of Bitcoin. The word “custody” is another analogy used to encapsulate the idea that these users don’t have to ask another person to sign a message on their behalf.
No one “custodies” Bitcoin at all; there are no “Bitcoins”.
You can blame the idea that Bitcoins are like actual coins from the retarded use of the gold coin images that have polluted the minds of politicians and many others. This money imagery is the cause of the widespread confusion over what Bitcoin actually is, which is not money, but a messaging and database system.
It is simply not true that “transactions are processed on the user’s local device”. Bitcoin signatures do not require a device at all, and can be made with a pencil an piece of graph paper.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=y3dqhixzGVo&ab_channel=KenShirriff
Lummis & Co. do not know this, because they are computer illiterates. Most people are, and that's OK. What is NOT OK is telling American citizens what they can do with their writing of math. That's unacceptable at any time and anti-American by default.
If they knew this fact about what Bitcoin actually is, that it is a form of writing (math), they would understand that the devices people use are mere conveniences and not prerequisites to signing messages before being sent to the Bitcoin network for addition to the chain of blocks, which does require a computer.
The fact that a computer is required to send messages is also protected speech under the Constitution, lest anyone believe that the use of a computer changes the nature of the basic act.
For Lummis & Co. because Bitcoin wallets look just like their Bank of America apps, they cannot conceive of what is actually going on under the hood of a Bitcoin “wallet” app, and how radically different these apps are from banking apps.
They see the conventions used by Bitcoin “wallets” including a chronological list of “transactions” and a “balance”, without any understanding of of what is happening in the background. They think the analogies are the reality. That is not so.
For all her many faults, Lummis is trying her best to get to grips with Bitcoin. She has not doubled down on some of her more outrageous and insulting ideas (https://medium.com/@beautyon_/unpacking-the-lummis-gillibrand-responsible-financial-innovation-act-6128e6db6a68), has abandoned them in a timely manner of her own accord (apparently), and so she should be applauded and helped correct her thinking, since this appears to be possible, so that she can transform herself into an ally of American citizens from being a leader in the ranks of the bitter enemies of, "We the People".
Damus just ate a thousand word reply I wrote to you. YOU’RE SAVED!
It is not true that Bitcoin’s rebellious, DIY, mid-seventies-like, Cypherpunk era is over.
The exact opposite is true.
Bitcoin was written after the mid-seventies Home Computer revolution took place and “ended”, putting the power of software development in everyone’s hands at a cost of essentially zero. Before that, to develop and run software, you had to book time on a large UNIX machine at a University, and that was only possible if you were enrolled as a student at an institution with a computer. Computer illiterates don’t know any of this important context and history.
Bitcoin was written on widely available, ubiquitous commodity computer equipment available from Walmart to Radio Shack. It was written in programming languages that were free and on operating systems that came for free with the machines they ran on. None of this was true previously; the cost of a commercial software license for AT&T UNIX was $30,000, out of reach for all but companies and educational institutions. Even the single user license of $150, whilst not an impediment for the die hard, was eliminated when Bitcoin was written by GNU. Universal availability of computing made the software development revolution possible. It meant that anyone anywhere could write software without permission, admission to University or supervision of any kind, and then they could distribute to anyone anywhere it without permission at a cost of near zero.
In the early days, software was distributed by mail order on floppy discs. Then it was distributed by BBS systems over telephone calls modem to modem. Now it is distributed over the Internet, for free. The commodification of computers and elimination of the cost of tooling to write software, remote connecting and expanded access to every form of intellectual pursuit in software from game development to book writing and research.
Can you see what’s coming next?
Universal access to programmable synthetic money in the form of Bitcoin will mean that anyone anywhere will be using Bitcoin. Nation States, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds’ are irrelevant to this, and will continue to be downstream of the innovators from the public, just as they were and are with the Internet, email and Bitcoin. Nation states, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds did not develop Bitcoin (or email or the web), and could not have developed it. They could not have imagined any of them, nor had they the skill to implement it. (See Paul Krugman’s predictions about the Internet being no more important than the Fax machine, or his most recent predictions about Bitcoin. What a joke!) The members of their impotent class will be, at best, peers on the network, like everyone else is. They are no longer special, privileged or required. At all.
That’s the whole point of Bitcoin, in case you didn’t know.
Jeremy Alaire famously said many years ago of the Bitcoin ecosystem, “It’s time for the grown ups now”. He was 100% wrong, and ended up peddling altcoins and unethical stablecoins because the immovable and immutable object “Bitcoin”, resists partially informed incomers with their clever plans to improve it. This feature of Bitcoin (and it is a feature, not a flaw) is what is currently being missed by FinTech bros, WallStreet Wonks, tenacious tangentials and other people who have just come to the ideas that spawned Bitcoin; reality no longer operates by proclamation of the self anointed.
It is a good thing that a small number of Americans are finally capitulating to Bitcoin, however in addition to capitulation, their parochial “Policeman of the World”, “my way or the highway”, “our institutions and governance models are the only possible way forward” mindset is best abandoned by them; no one on Earth wants to hear it, everyone is fed up with them, Bitcoin can’t hear it, and all real Bitcoiners ignore it.
The subconscious urge to control everything is strong in many characters; this is why rebellion is cast in a negative light by Statists. Change is not rebellion. Change is the essential process of all existence. Change is coming to what money is and how it is mediated, and in this change, the old players are removed from management, oversight, design or input of any kind. They are excluded. They are exsanguinated.
Yesterday’s men can’t conceive of any power outside of the familiar structures from their past; “the big boys” will always be the great powers. They don’t seem to realize (why should they?) that Bitcoin is sitting on top of something that has already completely eroded the power of many venerated “staple of modern life” institutions to great effect and universal benefit
Journalism: Junked
Music Distribution: Marginalized, Decimated
Publishing: Pulverized
Dictionaries: Destroyed
Telephone Companies: Trashed, Castrated
Censorship: Cauterized and Circumvented
Government Postal Services: Gutted, Piked, Slaughtered
Only the most naïve of people thinks the entry of Nation states, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds as peers on the network abolishes Bitcoin’s rebellious, DIY, mid-seventies-like, cypherpunk era. On the contrary; the spread of Bitcoin makes Cypherpunk and the culture of rebellion the norm. It is Cypherpunks that are the innovators, and they’re continuing to prove it. Look at how one software company, Blockstream, run by a Cypherpunk, is providing financialization services to a nation state that were unimaginable before Bitcoin. All of this is obvious to anyone who can think.
The Cypherpunks and their direct descendants are building the new companies, software and services that cannot be revoked or “supervised” by outsiders, cowards, Statists, carpetbaggers, thieves, Socialists, and other human moths attracted to the bright flame of Bitcoin.
Look at Nostr for another example. While everyone downstream of Twitter as consumers complained bitterly about it, one man decided to offer a possible solution to it. No one saw it coming, or even thought it possible. Now, like it or not, an ecosystem has the very real potential (because it is real) of emerging on it, where the people using it cannot be told what to do or say.
This is exactly analogous with what happened with Bitcoin. Wall Street Wonks complaining bitterly about “the corrupt system” could not imagine Bitcoin, and then Bitcoin…existed, and now it cannot be stopped, like it or not, and its nature will not be changed because Bitcoin’s rebellious, DIY, mid-seventies-like, Cypherpunk era is not only not over but will never end. This is a safe prediction to make; look at how features of the web are developed, through the IETF process. The people at the coal face are doing the hard work of fundamental design, and corporations have nothing to do with it beyond paying the salaries of the designers; the “big players” don’t have a say in how things actually work.
Apple learned this the hard way by trying to introduce a new protocol called “AppleTalk.” Launched in the mid-1980s, AppleTalk was designed to facilitate networking in Apple environments, allowing Macintosh computers to connect and share resources seamlessly. Despite its initial success within Apple’s ecosystem, AppleTalk struggled to gain broader acceptance due to the dominance of other networking protocols like Ethernet and TCP/IP. Over time, as the industry standard shifted towards TCP/IP, Apple gradually phased out AppleTalk, officially discontinuing support for it in 2009. “2009”...a special year, wasn't it? This is exactly like Wall Street trying to “take over” Bitcoin and change it. It cannot happen, and there will be no “The Grownups are Here Now” moment in Bitcoin. History indicates this strongly, but you have to know your history in order to understand this.
These are just a few of many examples showing the nature of the change and who is being excluded as a consequence. Everyone who has the power to create software and services is fed up to the back teeth with being told what they are, what they can do, what they can say, how they must implement software tools, and being on the bottom rung of the perverted “Society” where Nation states, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds have control over what money is and how it is allowed to move.
That’s over chaps.
The masses using Bitcoin at every level are together far more powerful than any Nation state, hedge fund or sovereign wealth fund. The masses using Bitcoin as money is an absolutely inevitable outcome, and it will happen on the terms of the Cypherpunks, not Nation states, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds.
BITCOIN.
Excited.
NOSTR is not dying.
SLASHDOT is dying.
GET IT RIGHT, PLEBS!
It seems to me, and correct me if I’m wrong, that there only needs to be one Bitcoin Conference ever, for all time, and then that conference put on YouTube for everyone to watch forever, will be the only one required, without ever doing another one.
Doest this make sense?!
1. Reject lying and infantlilism like "absolutism". There are absolutes, there is "truth" and reality is not a matter of "Perspective" or "Nuance". There is no such thing as "individual truths".
2. Truth is not a matter of balance. There are absolute rights and wrongs, and these are discoverable in ways that make refuting them impossible. This is why Bitcoin was written. Critical thinking is in aid of discovering absolute truth. Science is not truth; it is a method only, and is never "settled". Truth can be settled, like Maths, Biology, Physics and Chemistry, which are not part of Science.
3. Taking action to solve problems together is a good thing, but cœrcing people to solve problems by violent collectivism and "Democracy" is not. Conscripting people into you morally repugnant and offensive "Society" is slavery, and slavery is evil.
READ ALL ABOUT IT.
https://mises.org/library/book/new-liberty-libertarian-manifesto
INGSOCs fatal conceit is the belief that legislation solves problems. It doesn't all this nonsense means is that manufacturers will leave INGSOC and CALISOC so they can produce their goods in free countries.
It doesn't matter if it is bad practice that bad passwords are shipped with goods; what matters is the principle of the State telling people how they should run their companies, down to the technical details of password strength.
Anyone who calls themselvs a "Bitcoiner" cannot be for this. If they are, they are painfully naïeve, believing that these same computer illiterate geriatrics are not coming to Bitcoin to demand that the 21,000,000 limit be increased, "For the good of Society".
There are not enough hours in the day, days in the year, or years to keep teaching these fundamental principles over and over to stupid, naïeve, ignorant dullards. This is why Bitcoin needed to be written, so that the law is laid down once and forevermore in a way that cannot be undone.
Once the money supply is constrained, the State will not be able to force you to set passwords.
YES, that is the true purpose of Bitcoin, Droogie!
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↓ FROM BRUCE SCHNEIER, BITCOIN DENIER ↓
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The UK Bans Default Passwords
The UK is the first country to ban default passwords on IoT devices.
On Monday, the United Kingdom became the first country in the world to ban default guessable usernames and passwords from these IoT devices.
https://therecord.media/united-kingdom-bans-defalt-passwords-iot-devices
Unique passwords installed by default are still permitted.
The Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Act 2022 (PSTI)
introduces new minimum-security standards for manufacturers, and demands that these companies are open with consumers about how long their products will receive security updates for.
The UK may be the first country, but as far as I know, California is the first jurisdiction. It banned default passwords in 2018, the law taking effect in 2020.
This sort of thing benefits all of us everywhere. IoT manufacturers aren’t making two devices, one for California and one for the rest of the US. And they’re not going to make one for the UK and another for the rest of Europe, either. They’ll remove the default passwords and sell those devices everywhere.
Another news article.
EDITED TO ADD (5/14): To clarify, the regulations say that passwords must be either chosen by the user, or else unique to the device. If unique preset passwords are used, they can’t be produced by an algorithm that makes them easily guessable. Here is the actual language of the regulation.
This means that all Dutch developers are in danger, not developers in free countries.
And foreign developers don't need to ever go to the land of the Dutch for any reason in perpetuity, because the world is a big place. Did you know that?
All this does is reinforce the attractiveness of El Salvador and other free countries as not only havens of peace, but very soon, havens of innovation where people are free to write software and release it.
El Salvador could be the centre of all important software development if they maintain reason and an environment of Liberty, and from there, absorb all the developers and businesses and reap the benefits.
Will it be perfect? No.
Will people release disruptive tools? Yes.
Is that a reason to regulate software development? NO.
And if you don't think regulation of software development is not coming, you are mentally retarded.
As I've been telling you; if Bitcoin is money then software is money and writing software will be regulated. The Tornado Cash conviction is the most recent excrescence of this abominable nonsense.
This is an example of the great danger of computer illiterate judges simply making things up when delivering a judgement.
By this, all BitTorrent developers, and the Linux distros that distribute clients, are culpable for the uses Linux and BitTorrent are put to. It's insane to anyone who can think...
And that's the problem in a nutshell, isn't it?
I’m sick
I’m sick of all my kicks
I’m sick of all the stiffs
I’m sick of all the dips
#Bitcoin
Then why reply, Droog?
It would be a good idea to for “Bitcoiners” to buy a map, and study what “Jurisdiction” means.
Whenever you hear an American say, “things are bad in Bitcoin”, several things are inevitably true.
They think America and its “SEC” are the only powers on Earth.
They refuse to name the enemy that causes their fear; “The State”.
People like this can never solve problems because they’re psychologically incapable of imagining a world where their beloved State is smaller.
These people were never truly aligned with Bitcoin’s aims; they think the purpose of Bitcoin is “decentralisation”.
It is not.
The purpose of Bitcoin is replacing fiat, not to act as a perfect expression of a database software problem.
And Bitcoin has no aims; it is not a person.
People have aims, and if your aim is X it’s up to you to make it so. If you refuse to face reality, other people who do, will, and you’ll be drowned out.
And even if Bitcoin was perfect to their standards, it would still be corrosive to the power of the State, and distribution and dissemination of it into the economy would remain a problem (app stores)…or do these delusional people believe the State will throw its hands up and walk away, “because distributed”? You’ll still be an enemy of the State, and a target, even with a perfect Bitcoin, silly little boy.
The level of delusion, infantilism, brainwashing and just plain silliness on constant display is shocking and perplexing. If it were not for the bright future coming it would be depressing.
You the observers can choose to listen to the negative Bitcoin Cult members, and wallow in the pool of misery they sit and stew in that they want to drag you all down into.
Or you can go boldly into the future with real Bitcoiners and step into the bright future with them.
Easy choice Droogies!
