jack dorsey, founder of twitter and CEO of block, is establishing a “bitcoin legal defense fund” in response to the rapidly advancing legal campaign by dr. craig wright.
The proposal was sent to the bitcoin developer mailing list by dorsey, alex morcos of chaincode labs, and blockchain academic professor martin white, apparently the three members of the fund’s board of directors. Although it purports to be a bitcoin defense fund, the wording of the proposal itself reveals that there is only one type of legal battle Dorsey is interested in fighting: those protecting BTC:
Reading: Jack dorsey announces bitcoin legal fund
“the bitcoin legal defense fund is a non-profit entity that aims to minimize the legal headaches that discourage software developers from actively developing bitcoin and related projects, such as the lightning network, privacy protocols of bitcoin and the like”.
an email to @jack’s bitcoin development mailing list explaining the bitcoin legal defense fund pic.twitter.com/y1xy3xg0ir
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— zack voell (@zackvoell) January 12, 2022
the ad identifies dr. wright’s groundbreaking legal battle (filed via tulip trading) for courts to recognize that bitcoin developers owe fiduciary duties to those who rely on their development and maintenance of the blockchain as the first target for “defense ” from the bottom.
the proposal is in keeping with jack dorsey’s pattern of opposition to bitcoin and dr. craig wright specifically. The fund’s founding echoes Twitter’s founder’s previous establishment of the Open Cryptographic Patent Alliance (CUP). copa was initially sold by dorsey as an independent anti-patent litigation group for the cause, but since its founding nearly a year ago, the so-called alliance has yet to do anything but oppose dr. Wright’s claim on the bitcoin white paper. alliance members consist almost exclusively of btc’s most notorious proponents and outspoken critics of dr. good.
The most revealing part of this latest proposal is that the fund, despite having already identified its first target in dr. wright and the tulip trade—it’s not raising any money. given that the fund appears to consist of only dorsey, morcos, and white, the announcement appears to be less about establishing a general purpose fund for defenseless defendants and more of a statement that jack dorsey’s twitter billions will be especially available to anyone who finds themselves facing dr. wright in court. in fact, the announcement acknowledges that the claims and defendants the fund chooses to defend are entirely at the discretion of the three-person board.
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dorsey’s move is likely to give dr. Wright’s legal opponents a little more financial rope, but it won’t help them fend off their legal arguments once they’re in court. dr Wright advocates the imposition of fiduciary and illicit duties on blockchain developers with respect to their user base, and there is a strong basis in law to determine that such duties exist. In addition to the UK court’s provision to extend fiduciary duties to novel relationships, courts in other jurisdictions have also held peer-to-peer software distributors directly liable for the infringements they enable: see US. Supreme Court ruling in MGM Studios, Inc. v. grokster, which found p2p software distributors directly responsible for infringing their users’ copyrights. Even if courts fall short of finding that blockchain developers have such duties to their users, there are still other avenues that could be used to hold blockchain developers accountable to the people who trust them. for example, the law may hold a party civilly liable for being an accessory to committing legal errors, even if they did not directly commit them, in the same way that a person may be held criminally liable as an accessory to a crime.
The timing of the announcement is likely due in part to dr. Wright’s growing list of legal victories, like last month’s landslide victory over Ira Kleiman, who was trying to argue that his late brother played a role in Dr. wright’s invention of bitcoin. the jury rejected that argument, finding that the invention was dr. wright is alone.
Given the amount of open litigation still based on whether dr. wright is the inventor of bitcoin, perhaps the bitcoin defense fund should be taken as a sign of desperation by its detractors.
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