Regardless of your view of Alex Jones, and regardless of your view of Stefan Molyneux the linked talk raises some very compelling questions.
My thoughts: Legally Youtube, Facebook and other social media platforms have avoided legal liability for what is shared on their platforms as they claim to be the platform, and not the editor. Sure they have terms and conditions, all companies do. Yet on these platforms we find many groups and individuals calling for violence, antifa, ISIS affilaites etc we find groups calling for the burning of GM crops, we find groups calling for the very destruction of state itself. Many if not most of these individuals and groups remain vocal on these platforms.
FB and YT are not editors right?
Now we find the loudest and most flamboyant "crazy" man Alex Jones expunged from these platforms.
Is this not editorial?
Does this not make these platforms legally liable for ALL content shared on their sites?
Just like a newspaper, or TV station is fined when they have someone on that calls for the killing of people or has a history of such, they are penalised, the content is taken down, often by court order.
If Antifa calls for violence on FB, to burn the state, kill all the politicians etc etc and this content is not removed and then a senator or president is murdered, is YT or FB not liable?
So what does this have to do with Crypto?
For the sake of this argument when I say Crypto I will be largely referring to privacy coins, not Bitcoin, but coins that can be sent peer to peer without government knowledge and/or control.
On YT and FB we find government, in the form of their editorial oversight, their policies mimic those of governments.
For both, the central authority can, at will, sanction and/or censor any party on their platform. Citizens by way of participating in commerce under state authority are essentially subscribers to the 'platform of the state'. Both entities can remove individuals from their platforms, one bans, the other jails.
Social media, and commerce are both essentially digital arenas, and both have a referee, an editor.
Crypto, is something new, it is value exchange AND speech (I will explain this in a moment).
To give an analogy, crypto is a reaction to the ref blowing his whistle when no foul has been committed, or when no foul occurs and a penalty is given. For those that watched the recent world cup, we saw the VAR get it wrong on more than one occasion. The digital oversight mechanism/authority gets it wrong, and the player, the voter, the worker, we all absorb the cost.
When you have a central authority that can blow the whistle on speech or commerce, mistakes happen. Worse, the very nature of both can be hijacked and pushed to the point we find state sanctioned violence, followed by civil unrest, leading to eventually chaos and a bloody revolution.
The point is we find free speech now in the form of privacy coins, privacy coins are currently the only form of "free speech" (definition below) that we have at our disposal.
All other human discourse, discussion, trade, opinion, "hate speech" dissent, art, lemonade stands, pick one, all of these things have a central authority that can exercise influence over the exchange, the interaction can be controlled, the corner store banned.
Privacy coins are perhaps the first instrument on earth that cannot be controlled (yet), yet represents an expression of free speech, this is what they have in common. Privacy coin exchange is quite literally "Free Speech".
"Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or sanction." - Google Try speaking with FIAT without the tax man lending an ear right.
In the past money was by definition not speech, one may cite Buckley v. Valeo and other rulings (by central authorities that may or may not have the power to entice their constituents to obey them) as proof that FIAT money is speech, commonsense proves this ruling nonsense, FIAT is not speech in the manner I am highlighting in this piece.
Crypto, on the other hand is emerging as both money and speech.
A new financial frontier.
Money whispers now, and only the receiver can hear it.