{"id":29293,"date":"2024-09-15T20:57:45","date_gmt":"2024-09-16T00:57:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/freshsites.download\/crytonews\/bitcoin-is-free-speech-why-jamie-dimon-was-wrong-and-governments-can-never-close-it-down\/"},"modified":"2024-09-15T20:57:45","modified_gmt":"2024-09-16T00:57:45","slug":"bitcoin-is-free-speech-why-jamie-dimon-was-wrong-and-governments-can-never-close-it-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/freshsites.download\/crytonews\/bitcoin-is-free-speech-why-jamie-dimon-was-wrong-and-governments-can-never-close-it-down\/","title":{"rendered":"Bitcoin Is Free Speech: Why Jamie Dimon Was Wrong and Governments Can Never \u2018Close It Down\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\"  width=\"580\" height=\"385\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/NRAKXsGPNLo?modestbranding=1\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><br \/>\n<br \/><center>J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon said that governments will &#8220;close [bitcoin] down.&#8221; In the U.S., thankfully, that can never happen because bitcoin is protected by the First Amendment. <\/p>\n<p>Subscribe to our YouTube Channel:<br \/>\nLike us on Facebook:<br \/>\nFollow us on Twitter:<br \/>\nSubscribe to our podcast at iTunes: <\/p>\n<p>Reason is the planet&#8217;s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won&#8217;t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;-<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;[Governments] like to the control the currency,&#8221; J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon said at a September 12 financial service conference, when asked why he thinks bitcoin is a &#8220;fraud.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;They control it through a central bank&#8230;the bigger these things get&#8230;they close it down.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Bitcoin enthusiasts were quick to point out that bitcoin can&#8217;t be shut down because it doesn&#8217;t have a CEO or corporate headquarters. It&#8217;s a software network that runs on computers spread around the globe, so any efforts to close it down would resemble a game of wack-a-mole.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the other point Jamie Dimon doesn&#8217;t understand: Bitcoin is also free speech. And though other countries could ban it, it can&#8217;t be made illegal in the U.S. thanks to the First Amendment. That&#8217;s because bitcoin is just code, and code is just speech, which is based on legal precedent established during the so-called crypto wars of the early 90s.<\/p>\n<p>In 1993, Phil Zimmerman faced possible criminal charges for writing the encryption software PGP. The government said that it was as dangerous as guns and bombs. To make the point that PGP&#8217;s source code is protected speech, MIT Press printed it in a book, sold it abroad, and Zimmerman was never indicted.<\/p>\n<p>Then in 1995, with help from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, mathematician Daniel Bernstein sued the U.S. government on First Amendment grounds for blocking publication of his encryption program.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Computer language is just that, language,&#8221; wrote Judge Marilyn Hall Patel. Ultimately, the Ninth Circuit Court affirmed Patel&#8217;s ruling that code has the same constitutional protections as a poem or newspaper article.<\/p>\n<p>The First Amendment protects users who keep their own bitcoins printed on a sheet of paper or stored in a software wallet, but it doesn&#8217;t preclude regulatory regimes like the New York BitLicense, which constrains the activities of third-party companies that maintain other people&#8217;s crypto holdings. But these firms are a vestige of the old-world financial system.<\/p>\n<p>If the world transitions from a dollar standard to a bitcoin standard, by then, software will have made it easier for users to maintain and trade their own cryptocurrency without involving a regulated company. And those activities have the same constitutional protections as other forms of controversial speech.<\/p>\n<p>That money can now be expressed in strings of numbers and letters that don&#8217;t require a government-sanctioned bank to declare them valid poses a mortal threat to the existing financial industry. Is it any wonder that the CEO of the world&#8217;s sixth largest bank wants to believe that the government can step in and offer protection?<\/p>\n<p>Written and produced by Jim Epstein.<\/p>\n<p>Music:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Rollin at 5&#8221; by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Too Cool&#8221; by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Common Consensus&#8221; by The Franks is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.<\/center><br \/>\n<br \/>\nJ.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon said that governments will &#8220;close [bitcoin] down.&#8221; In the U.S., thankfully, that can never happen because bitcoin is protected by the First Amendment. <\/p>\n<p>Subscribe to our YouTube Channel:<br \/>\nLike us on Facebook:<br \/>\nFollow us on Twitter:<br \/>\nSubscribe to our podcast at iTunes: <\/p>\n<p>Reason is the planet&#8217;s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won&#8217;t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;-<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;[Governments] like to the control the currency,&#8221; J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon said at a September 12 financial service conference, when asked why he thinks bitcoin is a &#8220;fraud.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;They control it through a central bank&#8230;the bigger these things get&#8230;they close it down.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Bitcoin enthusiasts were quick to point out that bitcoin can&#8217;t be shut down because it doesn&#8217;t have a CEO or corporate headquarters. It&#8217;s a software network that runs on computers spread around the globe, so any efforts to close it down would resemble a game of wack-a-mole.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the other point Jamie Dimon doesn&#8217;t understand: Bitcoin is also free speech. And though other countries could ban it, it can&#8217;t be made illegal in the U.S. thanks to the First Amendment. That&#8217;s because bitcoin is just code, and code is just speech, which is based on legal precedent established during the so-called crypto wars of the early 90s.<\/p>\n<p>In 1993, Phil Zimmerman faced possible criminal charges for writing the encryption software PGP. The government said that it was as dangerous as guns and bombs. To make the point that PGP&#8217;s source code is protected speech, MIT Press printed it in a book, sold it abroad, and Zimmerman was never indicted.<\/p>\n<p>Then in 1995, with help from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, mathematician Daniel Bernstein sued the U.S. government on First Amendment grounds for blocking publication of his encryption program.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Computer language is just that, language,&#8221; wrote Judge Marilyn Hall Patel. Ultimately, the Ninth Circuit Court affirmed Patel&#8217;s ruling that code has the same constitutional protections as a poem or newspaper article.<\/p>\n<p>The First Amendment protects users who keep their own bitcoins printed on a sheet of paper or stored in a software wallet, but it doesn&#8217;t preclude regulatory regimes like the New York BitLicense, which constrains the activities of third-party companies that maintain other people&#8217;s crypto holdings. But these firms are a vestige of the old-world financial system.<\/p>\n<p>If the world transitions from a dollar standard to a bitcoin standard, by then, software will have made it easier for users to maintain and trade their own cryptocurrency without involving a regulated company. And those activities have the same constitutional protections as other forms of controversial speech.<\/p>\n<p>That money can now be expressed in strings of numbers and letters that don&#8217;t require a government-sanctioned bank to declare them valid poses a mortal threat to the existing financial industry. Is it any wonder that the CEO of the world&#8217;s sixth largest bank wants to believe that the government can step in and offer protection?<\/p>\n<p>Written and produced by Jim Epstein.<\/p>\n<p>Music:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Rollin at 5&#8221; by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Too Cool&#8221; by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Common Consensus&#8221; by The Franks is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div class=\"mh-excerpt\"><p>J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon said that governments will &#8220;close [bitcoin] down.&#8221; In the U.S., thankfully, that can never happen because bitcoin is protected by the First Amendment. Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: Like us <a class=\"mh-excerpt-more\" href=\"http:\/\/freshsites.download\/crytonews\/bitcoin-is-free-speech-why-jamie-dimon-was-wrong-and-governments-can-never-close-it-down\/\" title=\"Bitcoin Is Free Speech: Why Jamie Dimon Was Wrong and Governments Can Never \u2018Close It Down\u2019\">[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29294,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/freshsites.download\/crytonews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29293"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/freshsites.download\/crytonews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/freshsites.download\/crytonews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/freshsites.download\/crytonews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/freshsites.download\/crytonews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/freshsites.download\/crytonews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/freshsites.download\/crytonews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/freshsites.download\/crytonews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/freshsites.download\/crytonews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/freshsites.download\/crytonews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}