Crypto Twitter is lighting up with a new in-your-face message from Jameson Lopp, a Bitcoin engineer and the chief technology officer at CasaHodl.
Lopp says Bitcoin is a big ‘F*ck you.’
Countering the well-oiled narratives stating that Bitcoin’s primary purpose is to be digital gold, a hedge and a store of value, Lopp tells his 200k+ followers on Twitter that Bitcoin’s main function is flipping off the Man – every centralized authority that tries to get in between you and your money or tries to turn it into worthless toilet paper through monetary policy manipulation.
Bitcoin's primary function is not "store of value" – that's a result of its primary function.
Bitcoin is "fuck you money."For example:
You want to seize my accounts? Fuck you.
You don't want me to buy ______? Fuck you.
You want to steal my wealth via inflation? Fuck you.— Jameson Lopp (@lopp) November 24, 2019
From payments at Pornhub, where PayPal decided to stop support for adult entertainment workers, to a reveal from a former PayPal executive who says his Bank of America bank account was abruptly shutdown for no reason, Bitcoin is often praised as being censorship-resistant. If money is a language that allows people to express themselves, Bitcoin allows anyone anywhere in the world to speak freely.
According to the team at Messari,
“This encroachment of financial rights and privacy started as part of the post 9/11 effort to choke off terrorists and criminal networks. (The PATRIOT Act admittedly sounds better than the “this actually solidified the fact that Bin Laden won the war” Act.) But that encroachment has moved deliberately towards less dangerous, still iffy legal gray areas like porn, pot, and gambling.
These days anyone can be de-platformed from social media and unplugged from the financial matrix. For any reason, really.”
Says PayPal’s former finance chief Roelof Botha, now a partner at Sequoia,
“After being a customer of Bank of America for 20 years, I received this notice today that they decided to fire me as their customer! With absolutely no explanation….”
But crypto enthusiast Reina Nakamoto tells Lopp it’s not that simple. Bad actors beware – Bitcoin is not to be construed as a license to commit crimes.
“Uh no, that’s not how it works. The ‘FU’ part doesn’t matter. The govt definitely doesn’t want people to buy child porn, and it will trace that trail from the customers all the way to the admin of the website, and arrest them. Rightfully so.”
US and Korean authorities just busted a darknet operation by tracing crypto and Bitcoin transactions. According to the indictment, 23-year-old Jong Woo Son was running one of the world’s largest markets for child pornography.
He’s currently serving an 18-month prison sentence in South Korea. The U.S. Department of Justice also lists the names of 36 men who were arrested and charged.
