Bitcoin Needs an Aggressive Legal Defense

Across the board, bitcoin requires forceful and aggressive legal defense, not complicity with governments in crafting policy and regulations. It’s going to get a lot rougher for bitcoin in the months and years ahead. We have to be prepared.
As Rick Falkvinge, author of Swarmwise, states, “The copyright monopoly war wasn’t the war, it was the tutorial mission. The Internet generation is using technology to assert its values and its place in society, the old industrial generation is pushing back hard against irrelevance. Things are about to get much worse.”
It is a superb analogy. Legal tender is essentially an unearned copyright privilege over the production of money. It is unlikely to be easily disrupted.
Only the naive can delude themselves into thinking that governments will embrace bitcoin in the name of monetary innovation or a modern techno-transition to the ‘Internet of Things’. What government permits with one hand, it restricts and strangles with the other. Therefore, any regulatory gains by the bitcoin community are elusive, because they are designed to appease, while government enforcement actions reveal a contradictory agenda.
The real battle lies elsewhere, beyond the public policy debate.
There hasn’t been a judicial test case for bitcoin legal issues yet, primarily because at least two candidates that got sufficiently close to a legal challenge elected to comply with authorities rather than risk the uncertain outcome of a test case.

This post was published at Coin Desk on November 24, 2014.