Hacker News Reader

Comment by FabHK | Hacker News Reader

You are conflating money and messages. It is perfectly compatible to argue, simultaneously, against cryptocurrencies, and for e2e encrypted messages.

View on HN

It's certainly a needle you can thread, but I don't think such nuance will be a winning political argument.

e2e encryption is in danger as is, and the strongest arguments against both are rooted in the same ideological substrate (criminals vs those needing protection); as are the arguments in favor.

The Supreme Court of the US has determined money to be speech, so this is an unwise position to take.

If you ask the government to prevent the use of cryptography in cryptocurrencies then you undermine the argument that the government should not tap or intermediate all communications.

At the end of the day, a financial transaction IS a message. It’s a command to a ledger to make an adjustment.

And nobody is arguing against digital money.

I am just arguing against public blockchains, resulting in a very specific, wasteful, and unregulated form of digital money.

IANAL, but as far I understand, "money is speech" relates to the 1st amendment, whereas wiretapping and key escrow relate to the 4th amendment. Which legal theory could be reasonably applied to map from "ban/regulation of crypto-currencies" to "ban/regulation of E2EE communication"?

I'm specifically asking for a legal theory, not a political framing, because your explicit mention of the Supreme Court implies a scenario where politics will ban/regulate one of both things, and then courts will employ the "money is speech" argument to map the ban/regulation of that one thing onto the other thing.

Good question. When you look at the original tweet, he said that systems that lack recoverable credentials are not “safe”. From there, it’s easy to argue that if we want “safe” systems, then we need recoverable credentials. Recoverability in a cryptocurrency context necessarily implies mandatory key escrow or algorithm backdoors.

This is my line of reasoning. Whether he dislikes cryptocurrency or not is irrelevant, but the argument that you cannot have a safe system with private credentials was what I found objectionable.

EDIT: Re legal theory: The idea that cryptographic systems are unsafe is likely to result in a weakening of protections for such systems. Cryptocurrency is an easy target because it’s essentially 100% cryptography and because it has no patron. The banning on cryptocurrencies can be extended to a ban on private keys via the safety argument.

Closest analogue might be gun control (Encryption is legally considered a munition).

Last edit, I promise: this creates a situation where a cryptocurrency wallet is simultaneously a munition (2nd amendment), speech (1st amendment), and secure papers (4th). Legislators could use this nexus to move between domains to expand the scope of any bans.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com