The early stages of a lawsuit against Bitcoin.com are falling into place.
While the matter to be litigated is interesting in its own right, this action raises deeper questions raised about decentralization of governance and ownership. Traditionally the name "Bitcoin" would be trademarked and ownership of that trademark would be owned by some legally recognized entity. While trademarks can be abused, adding costs to innovation, this particular instance is a good example of why they exist in the first place. It should be clear to a purchaser that what they are getting is what they expect. Properly used, trademarks help ensure a customer gets what they pay for.
But who owns the name "Bitcoin"? For that matter, who owns the Bitcoin network? Decentralization of governance makes this a difficult question to answer. If the core developers wanted to trademark Bitcoin, what entity would own that?
There are people in the crypto world that want nothing to do with traditional legal systems such as trademarks, patents and securities regulations. Their arguments aren't without some justification because there are plenty of examples where these laws and regulations are used to stifle innovation. But a system without these is just as prone to abuse, arguably even more so.
The anti-establishment thread that weaves through crypto has to answer these issues. There is nothing about algorithms and consensus protocols that changes the fact there will always be dishonest, ethically ambiguous, corrupt and criminal actors that work to game the system in their favor.
I'd rather face the "dishonest, ethically ambiguous, corrupt and criminal actors" on the level playing field of crypto where I still stand a chance, than on the very uneven traditional playing fields of stock exchanges, banking and government regulated financial platforms that are always biased towards the rich.
In short: I choose obvious theft over legalised theft.
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It's always better when you know who the enemy is. My hope is that crypto comes up with better ways to deal with the bad actors.
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I'm a pretty good shot.
Not hinting at anything, just making a general statement...
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