bitcoin – Unconventional Perspective

Thanks to the first ammendment Bitcoin cannot be banned in the US as other countries did.

In 1993, PGP encryption software author Phil Zimmerman faced criminal charges because the government said that encryption is as dangerous as guns or bombs, but after MIT press printed the source code in a book to the make the point that PGP’s code is protected speech, the government retracted and he was never indicted.

In 1995 in a landmark case Bernstein v. Department of Justice, mathematician Daniel Bernstein sued the U.S. government on First Amendment grounds for blocking publication of his encryption program. This case resulted in establishing code as speech and changed United States export regulations on encryption software, paving the way for international e-commerce.