In a tweet[1] he posted on November 25, 2019, Carlton Fields Senior Counsel Justin S. Wales announced the publication of a unique research paper which linked bitcoin transactions with free speech and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The paper, which was co-authored with veteran First Amendment lawyer Richard J. Ovelmen, is part of Volume 74[2] of University of Miami Law Review. It’s called “Bitcoin is Speech: Notes Toward Developing the Conceptual Contours of Its Protection Under the First Amendment.”
“I wrote this article alongside my colleague Richard J. Ovelmen, a very important First Amendment lawyer who has written on the topic over the last 35 years,” said Wales during the beginning of an interview with Bitcoin Magazine.
Why Link Bitcoin and the First Amendment
The motivation behind this interesting intellectual effort revolved around the narrow and sometimes wrongful interpretation that regulators and courts apply to bitcoin transactions. In Wales’ own words, “one of the issues that we often see when governments pass regulation about Bitcoin or courts interpret whether the sale of bitcoin involves money transmission or implicates financial regulation, is that they look at Bitcoin in a very narrow way. They’ll say that Bitcoin is a currency, currencies are money, and there are these regulations that exist for money.”
But as Wales and his colleague argue, there are instances when bitcoin is much more than money or a financial tool.
“It’s more of an expressive communication tool which should be protected by corresponding rights and protections,” added Wales.
Furthermore, Wales defines Bitcoin as more of a computer network with corresponding checks and balances which runs under fair and mutually agreed upon rules. In his reading, outside of its purely financial purposes, Bitcoin also has the qualities of
