“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 is the First Amendment. This is the supreme law of the land. If this does not stand as such without first explicitly amending the U.S. Constitution, then the law of the land itself is completely and utterly illegitimate.
Software is speech. Bitcoin is speech. Bitcoin shall not be abridged.
Everything, literally everything about how Bitcoin works and functions is facilitating speech between people through the use of software. That is what a block is. That is what a transaction is. It’s all just messages being recorded.
Nodes broadcast messages. Miners receive and notarize messages to re-broadcast in collections as blocks. Nodes verify the authenticity and ordering of these messages. They archive these messages so they can be provided to all new nodes for download and verification.
That is all Bitcoin is on a technical level. Software people use to craft messages, to sign them for authenticity, to broadcast them to everyone else to verify. All we are doing is passing around signed digital messages, verifying their authenticity, and then choosing to act in the real world based on the contents of those messages.
Bitcoin is speech. Full stop. The software we use to operate and interact with it is speech. Full stop. “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech…”
I do not care what a judge in a court room says, or what an illegal piece of legislation says, or what some government stooge says or argues in the court of public opinion. I am an American citizen, and under the authority of the founding document of this country itself, I have the right to speak freely and without restraint.
If I do not have that right, then the legitimacy of any system in this country that tells me what rights I do or do not have is entirely non-existent. Either well, I will continue interacting with Bitcoin however I choose to.
It’s time to stop pretending that politicians will give you permission to exercise your rights if you beg hard enough. Assert your rights aggressively and take them. Whether that is in outright defiance or proactively taking them to court to hold them accountable under the existing rules they are supposed to be bound by, don’t ask, take them.
Rights aren’t granted, they’re taken and defended. Satoshi didn’t ask for permission to create Bitcoin, he just did it.
This post The First Amendment: Bitcoin Shall Not Be Abridged first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi.