✍🏽 [Analysis] The Constitution Protects Software Developers and Users - Coin Center

In a comprehensive report from Coin Center on constitutional law and anonymous cryptocurrencies, Peter Van Valkenburgh explains why decentralized exchange and anonymous payment infrastructure is the inevitable goal of cryptocurrencies and other ancillary digital assets. This evolution in payment and currency technologies could easily trigger significantly more aggressive financial surveillance policies from lawmakers and government agencies, but the report continues to detail how this response would be flatly unconstitutional. Regulating cryptocurrency software developers under the Bank Secrecy Act, for example, would be unconstitutional under Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless search and seizure. Regulating cryptocurrency software developers, moreover, via rigid occupational licensing or compelling alterations (e.g. backdoors) would violate Fourth Amendment protections for speech.