Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund

Good Morning Everyone,

Yesterday in an email to the bitcoin developers mailing list, Jack Dorsey along with Alex Morcos and Martin White, announced the formation of The Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund.

The Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund is a non-profit entity designed to defend developers from lawsuits and unwanted legal issues that may discourage developers from contributing to Bitcoin and related projects like lightning.

To quote from the email:

“The Bitcoin community is currently the subject of multi-front litigation. Litigation and continued threats are having their intended effect; individual defendants have chosen to capitulate in the absence of legal support. Open-source developers, who are often independent, are especially susceptible to legal pressure. In response, we propose a coordinated and formalized response to help defend developers. The Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund is a nonprofit entity that aims to minimize legal headaches that discourage software developers from actively developing Bitcoin and related projects such as the Lightning Network, Bitcoin privacy protocols, and the like.”

You can read the full email attached below.

The fact that bitcoin developers are being targeted legally is wild when you consider many of them contribute for free at their own cost, to what is a completely free and open source community project.

It raises many questions that our society is either not equipped to deal with in its current iteration, or seemingly somewhat unwilling to have honest conversations about.

How do we consider code legally? Is code speech? Are we free to express ourselves openly and freely? or are we not ? and if not, why not?

These are questions that need answers, and we need to think deeply and carefully about the way in which we answer them, as they lead us down diametrically opposing paths, and the impacts could not be greater.

Are we really living in a world where contributing code to a free and open source project can bring about legal attacks? Clearly it seems to be the case. How stereotypically dystopian that is.

The formation of the fund however shows a powerful level of clarity and commitment from Jack, Alex and Martin to have identified the need for this fund and to have executed on this. Jack said earlier in the year at the bitcoin 2021 conference:

“I don’t think there’s anything more important in my lifetime to work on and I don’t think there’s anything more enabling for people around the world.”

He went on to say:

“Whatever I can do, whatever my companies can do to make Bitcoin accessible to everyone is how I’m going to spend the rest of my life. If I were not at Square or Twitter, I’d be working on Bitcoin. If it needed more help than Square and Twitter, I would leave them for Bitcoin. But I believe both companies have a role to play and I think anything we can do as companies to help find the right intersection between a corporate narrative and a community open narrative is for the best.”

Since stepping down as CEO of twitter less than two months ago, Jack’s actions have been in complete alignment with these words. This is yet another powerful intentional action taken.

Developments such as this, really serve as a powerful reminder of the mission and how big the vision of Bitcoin actually is. The mission of Bitcoin is so far beyond that of an investment or some kind of get rich quick scheme.

As the saying goes, most get into it for number go up (NgU) technology, they stay for freedom go up (FgU).

Bitcoin is the trojan horse.

This is about freedom. To free our human society from the predatory behaviour of central banks and governments. To install a truly free market and fundamentally recalibrate society from the current short term rent seeking nature, where bad behaviour is incentivized, power centralizes and ultimately corrupts, and those who lie, cheat and steal the best win; to a world where the monetary system - that is the base layer of our society - is in complete alignment with our highest values and is programmed in to prevent the worst in us from corrupting the system.

Wishing you all well.

Hope you have a great day, and i’ll speak to everyone tomorrow.

AK

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