Last year I stood before you and asked, without a touch of irony, “Are you sick of winning yet?”
ARE YOU?
Well, GOOD NEWS! I’m happy to report that the winning has slowed dramatically.
But I do actually have some good news to share: my wife and I welcomed our third child, Nettie Mae Van Valkenburgh, on September 10th. A good day. A day when anything was possible and terrible things had yet to happen.
And since that day I’ve been on parental leave. This is my second day back.
I’m told some things went sideways.
Incidentally, this always happens when I go on leave. Congress will do literally nothing for years, and then I have a baby and it does all the things.
With my first child, they passed the infrastructure act and the broker provision that would have made developers identify and report on people using their software.
We helped Congress kill the broker provision. CLARITY and the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act especially, was our chance to get lasting protections for developers.
Losing it is no broker rule, but it is a frustrating missed opportunity.
If you’d told me in 2017—when Tom Emmer, Landon Zinda, Jerry Brito, and I started working on the BRCA—that it still wouldn’t be law in 2026, I’d have been unsurprised.
It’s Congress.
But after FinCEN clarified that noncustodial developers weren’t money transmitters? After the Justice Department started prosecuting some of them anyway? After bipartisan bills from Emmer, Torres, Wyden, and Lummis, a president demanding a crypto capital of the world, House passage, and actual negotiations in the Senate?
Still a handful of votes short.
I’d still be unsurprised. Just considerably more frustrated.
Nine years is a long time to ask people to wait for reassurance that writing software won’t get them prosecuted.
So what now? Let the regulators sort it out?
We should take every opportunity to fix bad policies at the agencies. And we were able to share some good news yesterday, that Treasury is withdrawing two proposed rules coin center fought against for years, the infamous “unhosted wallet” rule and the “mixer” as primary money laundering concern rule.
And of course the SEC and CFTC are charging ahead with rules. But the thing about new rules, is that there can always be newer rules.
Listen to what we’re saying when we tell a worried developer: “Don’t worry. We have a pretty good relationship with the Administration.”
That’s a fucking terrible answer.
They should be able to ask what the law is and get an answer. They shouldn’t need to know who I had lunch with last week.
I worry we’ve gotten so accustomed to doing business this way that we’ve started calling it freedom.
Because trusting the discretion of a regulator or prosecutor creates as many problems as it solves.
The government says: “We have no present intention of prosecuting you.”
Then you go to court to establish that it has no legal authority to prosecute you, and the government says: “Why are you here? We just told you not to worry.”
That’s what happened to Michael Lewellen. He asked a court to establish that publishing his noncustodial privacy software wouldn’t make him a money transmitter. The court dismissed his case for lack of a sufficiently credible threat of prosecution, relying on the Justice Department’s discretionary enforcement policy.
Promises too weak to protect the developer—but strong enough to kick him out of court.
Meanwhile, the prosecution of Roman Storm continues.
With CLARITY out, these court battles matter so much more because in our constitutional system only Congress and the Courts can actually make law.
With Coin Center’s support, Michael is appealing to the Fifth Circuit. A developer shouldn’t have to risk indictment to earn the right to ask what the law means.
We’re also fighting the 6050I reporting requirements and the IRS’s treatment of block rewards. Thank you to our co-plaintiffs in Carman v. Yellen, to Josh Jarrett, and to our Consovoy team: Cam, Zach, David—and welcome back to Jeff from the Supreme Court.
Coin Center wasn’t founded to collect favorable exercises of government discretion. We’re here to establish legal limits that survive the officials who happen to agree with us. Our mission was never simply to get the government to say yes to crypto.
Washington increasingly knows how to say yes to crypto when it can find an issuer, a compliance department, a transparent ledger, and a freeze function.
We have stablecoin legislation. Great. Stablecoins are useful products issued by financial institutions. But we still need to protect the right to build things that don’t require financial institutions.
Will the law tolerate software nobody controls, communications nobody intermediates, computer programs you run yourself, and transactions nobody has unilateral authority to reverse? Those are the harder questions.
And we, as in Crypto writ large, need to be honest about what we’ve built.
Crypto has given people plenty of reasons to think it’s mostly grift and gambling. If our contribution is merely helping existing financial and political power issue tokens, monitor users, and speculate, we’ve failed our own ideals and simply made ourselves useful to powerful people.
Monetizing power was never supposed to be the killer app.
Technology is politics in another form. We make choices about power when we choose our tools. A card, cash, or bitcoin. A model you run yourself or a company you tell everything to. Posting on someone else’s platform or actually speaking with your neighbors peer to peer.
Those choices determine who can watch, who can intervene, and whether you can leave. We spend a lot of time arguing about who should hold power in the white house, then hand it over to big tech CEOs and the surveillance state that loves them because the interface was convenient and addictive.
And boy are real Crypto’s interfaces inconvenient. We can’t keep telling people they need more education when what we mean is they should have run their own node, memorized a passphrase, picked friends for a multi-sig, and rolled casino-grade dice 99 times to hold their own crypto safely.
True self-sovereignty online is a beautiful idea, and Coin Center is here to insist that people have a right to build and maintain the tools that make it possible. But it also needs to become an accessible product for those who want it and an appealing product to those who don’t yet know that they need it. This is not a weird, fringe, magic-internet-money-person idea any longer. It is an existential idea for everyone in America, if we are to maintain our democratic and egalitarian power structures in the face of AI and an increasingly online life.
Give people control over their money, information, identity, and computation without requiring them to become professional cryptographers.
I don’t know whether we win these fights soon. But I know the stakes are getting higher. Real political enemies are on the horizon and new technologies are consolidating power and control rather than distributing it to the people. That’s why we launched Peer-to-Peer, our new newsletter on tech authoritarianism: who’s building systems to watch and control us, and who’s building ways out.
Subscribe. Unfortunately, we’re not even close to running out of content.
Coin Center will keep fighting.
And I know you will too. So thank you for supporting Coin Center tonight.
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I also want to give a special thanks to my incredible team at Coin Center: Antonie, Neeraj, Alex, Laz, and Jason.
They made it possible for me to be home taking care of my wife and our new baby while Congress did all the things.
That means more to me than I can hope to explain up here. Please give them a hand.
My newborn has me thinking about time. And being here in New York has me thinking about history.
Nettie was my grandmother’s name: Nettie Lyvonne Clinton. She came here from Arkansas to study piano at Juilliard, dreaming of Carnegie Hall.
Family lore has it that she met my grandfather on the 1 train, not far from this spot.
Lyle Van Valkenburgh. A young radio personality with a mustache and a questionable financial past.
Someone had sold him a Florida Key that didn’t actually exist.
He’d spent his savings on it.
So he came back north and got into the exciting new technology of his day: radio. Eventually he became one of the familiar news voices in New York.
My grandmother took a chance on him before she knew how that would turn out. And he took a chance on a young woman from Arkansas who thought she could play Carnegie Hall.
The name Nettie goes back further. My ninth-great-grandmother was Annetje from the Netherlands. She and Lambert Van Valkenburgh crossed the Atlantic in 1643 and came to New Amsterdam. Fucking English.
They had a pig farm in Midtown. Forty acres, roughly from 29th to 35th Street, west of Lexington Avenue.
You are eating on my family’s former mud wallow.
Unfortunately, Lambert and Annetje sold it to the Van Roosevelts. A family I’m told did pretty well in the centuries to come.
Between buying imaginary islands in the Caribbean and selling Midtown Manhattan, the Van Valkenburghs have a long and storied history of making marginal investment choices.
But they made lives.
And almost four hundred years after they first arrived, I’m here telling you about a new baby named Nettie.
I don’t know what she’ll want to do. Piano could be nice. We could use someone in the family with marketable skills.
I hope she asks for my advice. And I hope she has room to ignore it.
Like her ancestors did, she’ll need privacy to work out what she thinks. Control over her money to act on it. And some control over the tools that will increasingly help her think and speak.
She should be able to build something without first persuading an official that it will be safe, useful, or popular.
That kind of freedom doesn’t make every idea good or every person honest. There are island sellers in the metaverse.
But Nettie deserves the freedom to make mistakes. We all do. Freedom to engage in ineffective altruism, inefficient markets, misfittery, shitposting, comedy, and love.
Because from that wild unplanned avalanche of individual choices comes most of what is beautiful in humanity.
Our job is to keep that messy freedom legal. Your job is to build something worthy of it. Something Nettie will use without giving it a second thought. Not because her dad was a lunatic crypto libertarian; not because she’s a world class cryptographer; just because it’s the ambient default infrastructure for a technological civilization that prizes autonomy, diversity, and privacy over safety, control, and power.
And when I think about how long Nettie will need that freedom, comforting words like “we have a pretty good relationship with the current administration” sound like a very small thing to offer her.
She’s going to live through a lot of administrations.
So Nettie, if you hear this one day and you’re thinking about buying an island—or a politician—remember: verify, don’t trust.
Thank you.