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It's very true that Bitcoin has a very different sphere of authority than the civil magistrate. Yet there is still a very real sense in which Bitcoin is not just a signature validation machine, but an enforcer of a moral standard, just as surely as the civil magistrate ought to be. A peaceful enforcer, to be sure, but an enforcer nonetheless. Take Bitcoin's supply cap. That is the instantiation of a moral principle into Bitcoin's code; namely that your money shouldn't steal from you, but should be a lasting abstraction of your productive time and energy that should grow in value over time, rather than shrink. Not everyone agrees with that statement, either. Plenty of folks out there think a monetary system that doesn't steal value from its holders is unworkable. Even the purpose of signature verification you mentioned is based on a moral principle that no one should be able to take the value someone else has earned. Rather, each person should be able to dispose of his property voluntarily as he sees fit. Cryptographic signatures just ensure that moral principle is protected by inviolable code. We could move on to mining and the difficulty adjustment. Both of these core aspects of Bitcoin exist to enshrine the moral principles that 1.) no one should be able to arbitrarily create value for themselves without work, and 2.) that no one should be able to reverse a transaction without the consent of all the parties of that transaction. Most of these are just different outworkings of the basic principle "thou shalt not steal," of course, and applied to how a money ought to be designed to make various forms of theft difficult, if not impossible. Moreover, they are imposed unilaterally, in spite of the fact that there are plenty of people out there who disagree with many of the details of exactly how that basic principle ought to be reflected in our money.

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Well written and this is fun btw. Strong arguments to be sure. You’re right that Bitcoin encodes moral principles. The supply cap, signature verification, and PoW all instantiate “thou shalt not steal.” But here’s the distinction: those principles define what Bitcoin is, not what Bitcoin allows. They’re constitutional, not regulatory. The 21M cap and signature requirements are about Bitcoin’s nature as sound money. They don’t require ongoing interpretation. But filtering transactions by content means case by case moral judgments about what’s immoral, and that necessarily varies. Bitcoin’s moral architecture is complete in its monetary properties. Adding content morality moves from “this is what money should be” to “this is what money should allow.” That’s a different category. Your node, your conscience. But I see those as fundamentally different types of moral statements.