Topic: Bitcoin as Free Speech (Read 1162 times)

Correct. However I don't think you are going to get anything extra out of bitcoin just because you call/consider it "speech". Most countries do not even believe in/allow free speech. The countries that do allow free speech will not allow this to be used as an excuse to avoid regulations and/or taxes as these are both governed by business activity and income respectively 

Yes, it all depends how you define speech.

I would say that from a legal/constitutional standpoint you could argue that Bitcoin is a form of free speech (if for example Bitconi was ever made "illegal"), as what you are essentially doing when you broadcast a TX is broadcasting a message saying that you are wishing to spend some of your money a certain way. However beyond a constitutional viewpoint I would say that bitcoin is very much not a form of speech.

interesting

The OP is just speculating about the government misusing its powers.

Currency is just one application of Bitcoin.

All code is a form of speech and Bitcoin is an open source protocol which is literally written speech.

Was that directed at me? Unlike you, I can prove cryptographically what I said - that I was on the PGPi development team and that I knew both Phil and Peter well enough for them to sign my key. So, unless you can show us your public key signed by GOD, may I kindly suggest that you STFU?

I don't see how you make the connection between PGP and bitcoin. Nor do I agree with your conclusion that bitcoin is free speech.

All that Bitcoin is a way to send money to other people in a decentralized fashion. It is not going to cure cancer or create world peace (nor does it have anything to do with free speech)

I have the honor of knowing Phil personally. He's a great guy and PGP was a wonderful little program. For a while I was on the PGP International development team. In fact, I still use PGP.

Too bad that nowadays it has been mostly replaced by GnuPG, which is a humongous pile of crap, full of bugs and incompatibilities. In fact, the latest version of it completely dropped support for PGP 2.x - meaning that you simply can no longer use GnuPG to communicate with a PGP 2.x user. (Before it was only impossible to sign-only for a PGP 2.x user and sign-and-encrypt was horrendously awkward and needed 5 different commands.)

I don't think that Phil used the "free speech" argument. He mostly used the "I've never broken the law" argument - i.e., that he never exported PGP (the program) from the USA without a license. He did, however, publish its source in a book, using a special OCR-friendly font. The book was then scanned outside the USA and the result was the basis of the PGP International version. But this was done after a grand jury investigation was launched against Phil. He was never indicted, which suggests that the grand jury never found any evidence for illegal activities from his part.

The "free speech" argument was used by somebody else, although I can't remember his name right now. He printed on a T-shirt the source of a Perl program that did basic encryption and crossed the US border while wearing it, claiming that it was his 1st amendment right to do so. Although he was harassed several times, I don't think that he was ever indicted of any wrongdoing, either.

Finally, there was another funny case. At that time, because of the silly US export law, Unix machines were exported without the code for the crypt(1) program. However, they still contained some cryptographic code necessary to hash the passwords. Another cryptographer (Peter Gutmann, I think; another friend of mine) proved the equivalence between encryption and hashing (i.e., if you have a cryptographically secure hash function, it is possible to construct a cipher based on it, and if you have a cipher, you can use it to produce cryptographically strong hashes) and used the Unix functions for password hashing to produce an encryption program.

Ah, those were the days... (Gosh, I feel old...)

To return to your question, I don't see much sense in it. First of all, it is only governments that "classify" thins like that. To the best of my knowledge, no government has classified Bitcoin as munitions. Besides, Bitcoin is based in signing and hashing and although that's equivalent to encryption in a mathematical sense, no government is smart enough to make the connection and classify it as encryption. Finally, only certain kinds of things can be classified as free speech. The source of Bitcoin core (or any other program) is certainly free speech. Bitcoin itself is not, just as the number on a US dollar banknote isn't. Finally, by far not all countries recognize the concept of "free speech" (let alone have it embedded in their constitution), while Bitcoin is international and knows no borders.

Bitcoin is money an information. The free flow of information is and must always be protected as speech. Let me repeat that, money is now information, and it absolutely is "free speech".

Any laws which attempt to impinge upon that speech must be fiercely resisted and disobeyed by all free people

In 1991 a man named Phil Zimmerman released a software messaging system which could offer people a way to send text-based communication in a secure manner backed by the mathematical principles of public key cryptography among a host of contemporary hashing and compression standards. Zimmerman felt a need to create something that would give users an outlet for information confidentiality in an age where increasing threats of privacy invasion meant online communications were subject to prying eyes of government authority. These authorities were overstepping their boundaries of legal jurisdiction and attempting to exercise coercion in a domain where their actions came at the cost of information freedom. Originally designed as a human rights tool, the software encryption came to be published under an open-source license and adopted as an IETF standard. This software would be called ’Pretty Good Privacy’, or PGP for short.

The publishing of the PGP software landed Zimmerman in a three-year criminal investigation by the US Government, who classified the encryption as military-grade weaponry. As they claimed, the distribution of source code represented a “munitions export without licence”. During this time, encryption procedures which comprised keys larger than 40 bits were categorized as munitions under the US export regulations. The smallest keys PGP used were 128 bits, thus at the time they fit within the legal definition of munitions. If convicted, the penalties for violation were substantial.

Years before the government had placed encryption, a method for scrambling messages so they can only be understood by their intended recipients, on the United States Munitions List, alongside bombs and flamethrowers, as a weapon to be regulated for national security purposes. Companies and individuals exporting items on the munitions list, including software with encryption capabilities, had to obtain prior State Department approval.

—Electronic Frontier Foundation: EFF’s History

Zimmerman argued the case in a creative manner, publishing the entirety of the source code in a physical book, relying on the principle that weapons, bombs, and software may restricted goods and were justly under the regulation of the state. Books however, were protected under first amendment rights. In early 1996 the case was closed with no charges lain against Zimmerman or any subsequent party. Since that time, PGP has gone on to become the most widely used and trusted email encryption.

Economic Munitions
In the same way which PGP was originally classified as a sort of weapon, could bitcoin as well be seen as a type of munitions? Given that bitcoin is based upon the same public key cryptography that PGP originally was, and that a representation of a bitcoin key pair contains 512 bits of data, could it then be argued that bitcoin is nothing more than an exercise in the practice of mathematics, and if so, could it be reasonable to view bitcoin as free speech?

Read the full article here.

As an aside, I will also mention we are looking for writers who can dive into some of the more interesting/advanced topics of bitcoin. If this interests you, PM me or use the contact form on the Diginomics page.