Article from Reason by Jim Epstein.

[Governments] like to the control the currency,” J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon said at a September 12 financial service conference, when asked why he thinks bitcoin is a “fraud.”

“They control it through a central bank…the bigger these things get…they close it down.”

Bitcoin enthusiasts were quick to point out that bitcoin can’t be shut down because it doesn’t have a CEO or corporate headquarters. It’s a software network that runs on computers spread around the globe, so any efforts to close it down would resemble a game of wack-a-mole.

Here’s the other point Jamie Dimon doesn’t understand: Bitcoin is also free speech. And though other countries could ban it, it can’t be made illegal in the U.S. thanks to the First Amendment. That’s because bitcoin is just code, and code is just speech, which is based on legal precedent established during the so-called crypto wars of the early 90s.

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: By Web-dev-chris (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons