This was quite an interesting history of bitcoin, by the way
Or better stated, history of digital encryption
It is just over forty minutes, and is brought to you by ReasonTV. It is enjoyable also just to see images from early depictions of computers and the internet!
But I did not know (or had forgotten) that when public key encryption was first invented, what is now pretty plain-vanilla digital encryption, the US government argued that it would be illegal to distribute it because it was a weapon of war and subject to arms regulations. (Ironically perhaps we have come full circle on that now, as James Poulos argues that yes, computing systems do have a “weapons” side in a world where the battle between government and population is now an information war, and we need a digital second amendment to protect the right to use those computing systems as we wish.)
But the argument at the time was that computer code is speech… and there was also an effort (and lessons here for our day perhaps) to just get the information out there, because once it was out there no matter what the state said they really couldn’t do anything about it. And so, in 1977 twenty year old college student Mark S. Miller goes to MIT and gets his hands on a paper copy of the first paper about public key encryption, which MIT had decided (obeying the US government) they would not distribute, and he goes around to various copy shops in the area and has them all make a few copies of the thing, and then sends it to computer hobbyist organizations and magazines all over the country, plus some copies to personal friends with the message, “if I disappear, make sure this gets out”. Shortly thereafter the US government officially decided to allow publication.
But then in the early 1990s, again, Phil Zimmerman invents the PGP encryption protocol which makes encrypting emails easy-peasy and it goes around the world… and the US government investigates him for exporting weapons. (“Child pornographers, terrorists, and money launderers”, Timothy May says in an interview, take your pick, these are the people the state invokes when it wants to ban or control something.) But all PGP is is a series of instructions to be carried out by a machine, and that’s speech, proponents argued. So Zimmerman actually got MIT on board to print out the PGP source code on paper, bind it as a book, and ship it to European bookstores. And then the question was, “OK US government, are you going to suppress this publication of a book by a university?”. The government was loathe to go there of course, and the effort went far toward making the case that computer code was speech and could not be restricted.
It is nice that, no matter how badly they might wish it, there are certain things the state cannot control or change. They cannot change physical law. And they cannot change mathematics, which is really all these encryption schemes are.