# Peter Van Valkenburgh [Coin Center] at Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress

- Speakers: Peter Van Valkenburgh
- Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 19:34
- Topics: Education
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-J4RlaZT1D9U
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4RlaZT1D9U

## Description

Peter Van Valkenburgh [Coin Center]  on crypto wars, Tornado Cash defence, wiretapping practices vs court decisions, free speech maximalism in the United States, activism at Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress, 11.11 Bangkok.

X: https://x.com/valkenburgh
Web: https://www.coincenter.org

Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress: https://congress.web3privacy.info

Facilitated by The Web3Privacy now: https://web3privacy.info

## Transcript

so hello Cipher Punk Congress and hello Bangkok I come from Washington DC one of the many front lines in our defense of privacy and speech I've been research director at coin Center for 10 years now and this point where point up there we got it oh there we go good I've been research director at the nonprofit coin Center for 10 years this January I'll be taking over as executive director we rely on donations to do what we do so if you enjoy this talk please come ask me how you can support our work so we are living through a critical Junction in our Technologies and in our politics what salmon rushy has called a hinge moment in history when everything is in Lu and the future is up for grabs we need to seize that moment and as rushi said reality is not just simply something given it's not just sitting out there to pick up off a shelf reality is not like a bar of soap I would say it's an argument and always has been so if this hinge is really reality up for grabs again here's my argument here's the reality I want to Def fine Technologies for peer-to-peer and fully private transactions are the only way to preserve open and liberal societies against Rising techn technocratic totalitarianism so coin Center was founded in 2014 because we saw and anticipated this hinge moment coming and we wanted to make our argument Bitcoin was the beginning of that hinge at the time 10 years ago we couldn't know exactly how things would unfold we only knew for sure that these new technologies broke critical long-standing assumptions about what was possible loadbearing assumptions like one long-distance transactions will always be intermediated and intermediaries can therefore reliably exert powerful forces over the global economy two technological systems of great consequence typically have owners corporate structures CEOs and management who are persuadable corruptable and fickle and three socially relevant data cannot be individually owned and possessed like physical Commodities it must always be entrusted to a custodian or some other authority so Bitcoin made it clear that those assumptions would not hold much longer into the next century and the institutions in power built on those assumptions would likely resist deny and fight back so 10 years ago we expected that fight but for roughly eight years or so there was relative peace we got a lot done during that piece we educated many members of Congress and established some strong champions for crypto in the legislature in the US we worked with executive agencies like finsen to craft reasonable policy regarding who within crypto is engaged in activities for which registration and anti-money laundering surveillance are required and who is rightly excluded from those registration requirements we established a reputation for providing neutral and unvarnished information about these Technologies and their long-term Regulatory and policy implications but now I think that peaceful error era is over four things broke the piece our four Heralds of the second crypto Wars are the sec's perhaps Justified respons to the Ico boom Facebook's failed attempt to launch a stable coin Libra the implosions at FTX and terraluna and other scams in our space and four tornado cache specifically the Lazarus group's usage of the tool the subsequent us sanctions and criminal prosecutions of Alexi in the Netherlands and the Romans in the US at Devcon this Friday at 12:30 I'm going to give a talk about tornado cach if that topic is interesting to you please join me there now when I say that the peace is broken I do not mean that the US is now the enemy in fact the US is and must be our strongest Ally now many of you are not Americans and many of you are wary of American power projected globally so for this talk today I made it my job to convince you that America is the place where we can Define our reality where we can win our argument where the Technologies of disintermediated finance and ownerless digital infrastructure can flourish at an Illinois State Fair in 1986 Ronald Reagan said to the crowd the nine most terrifying words in the English language are anyone know I'm from the government and I'm here to help well here I am in Bangkok at a developer conference and I'm saying to you I'm from America and I'm here to help you're right to be suspicious but which America am I from am I from Reagan's America am I from Trump's America Biden's America Obama's America you must admit we've presented a bunch of different faces of over the last 50 years or maybe you're skeptical and you think that all those faces are just the same power structure wearing different masks isn't that a Darkly clever thing to think well I'm not from any of these Americas I'm from a very specific one dville America Alexis dville was a French Aristocrat who traveled to America in 1831 ostensibly to study prisons and penitentiary on a mission from the July monarchy in France he ended up writing an insightful book about the American system of government called Democracy in America where he argued that in many ways the American system is best poised to meet the challenge facing Europe at the time the rise of political equality the radical liberal Tendencies of those new popular majorities the collapse of the aristocracy and the decline of these conservative forces within Continental politics for me the most provocative chapters of denville's Democracy in America are those that detail our judicial system and our lawyers and I'll admit I'm a bit egocentric in that judgment as an American lawyer myself and quite proud of it but for dville it was the unique features of the American legal profession that prevented our otherwise inevitable descent into revolutionary turmoil and tyranny and as a Frenchman living in the early 19th century he knew what that path looked like quite well his chapter 16 causes mitigating tyranny in the United States lists essentially only two things the profession of the law in the United States and trial by jury almost 200 years later I still think he's mostly right I would just add software Engineers to that list the gist of the argument is here he's saying that our constitution in America is strong enough to bind the legislature unlike England whose Constitution is whatever the legislature says it is but also flexible enough to grow and change incrementally to meet new challenges and perpetually recreate rebirth the nation and if you know our history you see this everywhere Brown V Board of Education New York Times versus Sullivan katsu versus us Ro v Wade DC V heler dos V Jackson now let me be clear I'm not saying all of those were good decisions at least two of them are internally contradictory and a few of those I believe are incorrect but the process is what matters issues that might otherwise tear apart a nation can be discussed in the specific context of people with skin in the game the parties to the lawsuit zealous advocacy can be brought to bear by lawyers of both sides and a panel of justices Bound by their dignity to interpret the law according to an ancient tradition of legal reasoning offers a holding that will become precedent for future cases in 1831 dville wrote scarcely any political question arises in the United States that's not resolved sooner or later into a Judicial question hence all parties are obliged to borrow in their daily controversies the ideas and even the language peculiar to judicial proceedings and surely you can see this still at work today there's a reason we're in Bangkok and we talk so much about free speech bang uh uh privacy and the rights of cryptocurrency space We inherited it from the internet which inherited it from the hippies and the Libertarians of the late 20th century American West from agitators to Advocates to civil Libertarians and lawyers now there's another thing you should know about American law as dville wrote the English and Americans have retained the law of Precedence that is to say they continue to found their legal opinions and the decisions of their courts upon the opinions and decisions of their predecessors in the mind of an English or American lawyer a taste and a reverence for what is old is almost always United with a love of regular and lawful proceedings and so we must hearken back to our founding documents and our long line of legal precedence to build our case we're forced to come to grips with past people past Technologies past laws past patterns of being and analogize them to our own is publishing a smart contract like publishing a newspaper is a warrantless search of our cloud storage as bad as a warrantless search of our home we have to dig to find the constitution of America made as it is of short sentences buttressed by reams of real world examples and counter examples Case by case and Century by Century now some people think this is nonsense I think it's a protocol perhaps the only good protocol for ordered Liberty Through the Ages so with all that philosophy out of the way maybe you'll better understand my conviction that now is the time to lean into US Constitution and its law to protect our rights as developers and users of crypto in short there is a crypto shaped hole in our constitutional law and it's time we filled it the whole spans these two Monumental amendments the first and the fourth let's start with the fourth what you need to know beyond these words is the living history of the Fourth Amendment the side of that Constitution that changed and was reinvented several times through our history it looks like this in 1928 the Supreme Court decided Olstead vus and said that wiretapping did not violate the Fourth Amendment this allowed police to listen to conversations without proof of reasonable suspicion any judicial oversight and to use that evidence in court why because the tapped wires were not in the home or on the person of the citizen being searched they're reading the words literally they were on the public Street the court in 1928 felt they had appropriately construed the fourth amendment in the context of new technologies but it wasn't the end of the matter in 197 in 1967 the court overturned Olstead in the landmark decision cats V us the court believed that if a person had a reasonable expectation of privacy over something like an intimate phone conversation then it didn't matter if artifacts of that private act were inside of the home or not it got protection from warrantless search and seizure now what changed really more people started using phones and more important work was done over wire and it became abundantly clear to the court that if our system of ordered Liberty was to be preserved in any semblance of our founding documents we would need to more broadly apply the text of the fourth amendment to things like information over a wire but it doesn't stop there we went backwards again in the 1976 decision Miller V us the Supreme Court ruled that Americans have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the financial records they keep with third parties like Banks after all if you tell someone something why would you expect it to remain private if you tell your Banker your details why would they not give up that information without a warrant to government thus was born the so-called thirdparty Doctrine an exception small at the time to the warrant requirement for searches again the court at the time thought they had appropriately construed our fourth amendment in the context of new technologies what's happened since then mirrors the telephone we went from performing a handful of Bank related transactions a year your mortgage your auto loan maybe your paycheck to making every payment and transaction every moment of every day through third part third party Payment Systems now once again it becomes clear that if our system of ordered Liberty is to be preserved we cannot Abandon All privacy protections whenever a citizen happens to hand some data over to a third party for safekeeping or transmission to see the ills inherent in that Lawless regime we need only look at the proliferation of private surveillance and control by Banks and internet inter remediar at the benefit and behest of the state this explains why certain elements of our government react so violently to crypto it eliminates the hugely valuable intermediaries they've come to rely on for warrantless data collection or as narage our comm's director eloquently tweeted I'm sorry your warrantless surveillance regime was built on the assumption that people would always need inter intermediaries to transact this is why I call it a crypto shaped hole in our constitution crypto didn't make the whole the banks did and we along with them as we decided to use credit cards and apps for everything our privacy be damned crypto is poised to fix it and in the process should help us wake up to the very strange reality we find ourselves in in the 21st century where we have effectively no privacy rights in America make no mistake Victory will not be easy here there will be many who will argue that every system has a third party and therefore every search of a technological system can be conducted without a warrant those same people might even try to throw people in jail for Building Systems without discernible third parties they may even gain power in Congress one day and attempt to forcibly re intermediate these systems and ban the Alternatives they are our enemy and the courts and our fourth amendment are one of our best ways to defeat them the First Amendment there's a rising tide of free speech maximalism in the United States this has happened largely outside of the context of crypto and software development generally two decisions you should know IM IMS Health versus soral the Supreme Court overturned a Massachusetts law that banned pharmaceutical data Brokers from buying and selling information about what drugs doctors were prescribing does that sound like free speech why did the Supreme Court do this because in their words data is speech and speaker discriminating restraints on speech are unconstitutional even if it's the pharmaceutical marketers that we're protecting and in Creative LLC versus elist the court found that a law compelling a for-profit website developer to make wedding websites for gay couples was unconstitutional compelled speech in neither of these cases did the court Batten I that the speech in question was not particularly expressive that it was traded and made for profit and commercial gain or whether it was particularly good for liberalism it didn't matter to the court speech is speech and we don't control It in America these cases stand in stark contrast to some older speech cases dealing with software like Universal City Studios Incorporated versus Corley where the second Circuit Court of appeals unfortunately the appeals court sitting over Roman Storm's case in the southern district of New York found that DVD ripping software was not protected as speech because it doesn't quote Advance the values of the first amendment that case is just wrong the founders didn't seek to protect only speech that had the right values quite the opposite and the Supreme Court lately agrees now what's changed well we've learned since the early days of the internet that software is not just a good way for Universal Studios to sell you copies of Jurassic Park 3 it's also the way almost all critical technological systems for human flourishing are now researched deployed and implemented and if America is to be a beacon for the Free Press and I mean the machine like our Founders did not the industry per se then the best course is to protect all speech and let the chips fall where they may and we're so close to getting that holding code will be speech constitutionally we only need to fill the crypto shaped hole in our living American Constitution join me and we'll do it together [Applause]