Dorsey to establish legal defense fund for Bitcoin developers

In a post to the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Block (a.k.a. Square) and former head of Twitter, announced the launch of the Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund. Dorsey, who will sit on the Fund’s board, said the group would cover defendants’ legal fees in the “Tulip Trading” lawsuit.

Why should we care?
Dorsey framed the Fund as a legal tool for innovation. Open-source communities are particularly vulnerable to coordinated litigation, because individual developers lack the material or social resources to defend the work they do for free. Lawsuits “discourage software developers from actively developing Bitcoin and related projects such as the Lightning Network, Bitcoin privacy protocols, and the like,” the board wrote in its launching post. It’s also telling that, from the Fund’s standpoint, Bitcoin’s continued improvement requires strategic interfacing with extant political systems. Despite decentralization and borderlessness as central tenets within the Bitcoin community, much of the cryptocurrency’s fate rests in states’ hands.