The crypto trader and analyst who accurately predicted that Bitcoin (BTC) would crash below $23,000 months prior is issuing a fresh warning on the flagship digital asset.

Pseudonymous crypto strategist Capo tells his 480,200 Twitter followers that its just a matter of time before Bitcoin falls to new lows.

In an update to an earlier analysis where he had laid out two differing scenarios for Bitcoin, Capo says that the flagship crypto asset has taken the bearish option that could lead to the price dropping below $21,000. The alternative scenario involved Bitcoin turning bullish over the short term.

BTC. Second option playing out. Any test of $23,500 as resistance is a good sell opportunity. Consolidation below $22,500 (clean break + use the level as resistance) would be very bearish = $21,000 or lower. New lows are just a matter of time.

Bitcoin is trading at $21,158 at time of writing, down over 7% on the day.

According to Capo, Bitcoin is currently in the fifth wave of the main downward trend but could correct to the upside in a three-wave pattern to the $23,500 level. The Elliott Wave theory states that the main trend of asset prices moves in a five-wave pattern (i, ii, iii, iv, v) while they undergo a correction in a three-wave pattern (a, b, c).

The crypto strategist says that $23,500 would act as strong resistance pushing Bitcoin towards the $20,000 key area.

Option for the $23,500 test as resistance.

In March when Bitcoin was trading at around the $40,000 mark, the widely followed crypto analyst predicted that the flagship crypto asset would fall to under $23,000. Bitcoin went on to hit a 2022 low of under $18,000 in June.

Featured Image: Shutterstock/Tithi Luadthong/Edilus

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Crypto Trader Who Predicted Bitcoin Collapse This Year Issues New BTC Warning - The Daily Hodl

As we head into the final days of summer, we could be on the verge of a breakout for Bitcoin (BTC 0.21%). On Aug. 14, Bitcoin briefly traded above $25,000 for the first time since June. Understandably, this has the Bitcoin bulls excited because all the talk about "buying the dip" throughout the summer looks like it is actually working. After nearly two months of testing the $20,000 resistance level, it now looks like Bitcoin could be ready for its next big test: $25,000.

So should you buy Bitcoin at $25,000? There are two key factors to keep in mind here. One is the overall psychology of the market. The other is the presence of key catalysts that could be lining up for sustained, long-term growth in the price of Bitcoin. Let's take a closer look at both of these two key factors.

Crypto markets, much more so than equity markets, are based on a mix of gut feelings, emotions, and instincts. Sometimes you can just "feel" that the market is headed higher. Combine all this, and you arrive at what the British economist John Maynard Keynes famously described as "animal spirits." This was his way of explaining how markets moved up and down during times of uncertainty. It may be tempting to describe the markets in rational, data-driven ways, but when it comes down to it, human emotions matter. And right now, the animal spirits of the bulls are starting to reemerge after briefly hibernating during the so-called "crypto winter" in recent months.

Image source: Getty Images.

To see all this play out in the crypto markets, it's easiest to think in terms of resistance levels, which are simply key price targets. If a crypto can hit one price target, confidence and optimism build that it can hit another price target, and then another price target, and at some point, you're off to the races. And that's what we could be seeing now with Bitcoin, which has been testing the psychologically important $20,000 price point all summer. Briefly, it looked like the Bitcoin bulls were going to capitulate, but no longer.$25,000 is the new $20,000. And $30,000 will be the new $25,000.The longer you wait, the harder it will be to get in at an attractive entry point.

But wait, it gets better. That's because there is a rational, real-world economic factor that also has the potential to push Bitcoin higher. And that's the arrival of institutional money in the crypto market. Large pension funds, endowments, and foundations are just itching to put some of their capital to work in the crypto markets. We can see that clearly with the deal at the beginning of August between BlackRock (BLK -4.21%) and Coinbase (COIN -11.27%), in which BlackRock institutional and private-wealth clients will now have access to Coinbase crypto products and services via the Aladdin wealth management platform. This is hugely important because BlackRock is the largest asset manager in the world, with over $10 trillion in assets under management.

And BlackRock didn't rest there. Within days of announcing the Coinbase deal, it also announced that it was rolling out a private Bitcoin trust for its wealthiest U.S. clients. The company also gave what can only be construed as a full-throated approval for Bitcoin: "Bitcoin is the oldest, largest, and most liquid crypto asset and is currently our clients' primary subject of interest within the crypto-asset space."Boo-yah! Add in the fact that Fidelity Investments is now making it easier than ever before to invest your 401(k) plan in Bitcoin, and there are very strong signals that the next phase of Bitcoin's growth could be led by big, institutional investors.

This could end up being a September to remember.Bitcoin has lagged behind Ethereum (ETH -3.32%) for much of the summer, primarily because crypto investors were targeting The Merge and allocating their money first and foremost to Ethereum. The Merge, which is a massive technological upgrade for Ethereum, is now scheduled to take place on Sept. 15. After that date, we could see a return to the traditional situation in the crypto markets: Bitcoin being the center of attention for investors, and Ethereum being a secondary option. This, too, will result in more money flowing into Bitcoin.

Sure, The Merge could end up being a nothing-burger. And, yes, the price of Bitcoin could just as easily go to $10,000 as $40,000.But September could also be the start of another long, sustained rally in crypto in which Bitcoin will play a major role.

Dominic Basulto has positions in Bitcoin and Ethereum. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin, Coinbase Global, Inc., and Ethereum. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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Should I Buy Bitcoin at $25,000? - The Motley Fool

Data shows the Bitcoin mining hashrate has been moving sideways since five months now as the miners revenues remain low.

According to the latest weekly report from Arcane Research, the BTC hashrate right now is at the same level as back in May of this year.

The mining hashrate is an indicator that measures the total amount of computing power currently connected to the Bitcoin network.

The hashrate can be thought of as the degree of competition between the individual mining rigs online on the BTC blockchain.

Therefore, when the value of this metric is high, it means miners are facing higher competition on average at the moment.

This concept of competition arises because of the networks mining difficulty. A feature on the BTC blockchain is that the block production rate (or simply the rate of transactions being handled by the miners) remains generally constant.

But whenever the hashrate changes, so does this block production rate. For example, if the hashrate goes up, transactions are hashed faster as there is now more power to handle them.

To take the block production rate back to the constant that the chain wants, the network increases the aforementioned mining difficulty. And similarly, if it was the opposite case, it would have made a negative difficulty adjustment instead.

Now, here is a chart that shows the trend in the Bitcoin mining hashrate over the past year:

As you can see in the above graph, the Bitcoin mining hashrate seemed to have been on a constant uptrend, until May of this year.

Following May, while the indicator has been going up and down constantly, the overall trend has been that of sideways movement.

The main reason behind this trend is the struggling miner revenues. The BTC price has been down a lot during this period, which means the miners USD income has been significantly smaller (miners pay their running costs in the dollar, and not BTC).

Another factor at play here is that the hashrate is actually standing at a pretty large value right now. Because of this, the difficulty has been high, which has meant that the miners who arent able to compete against others in expanding their rig capacity are getting a lesser part of the block rewards.

As a result, miners who were already under pressure, like those with high electricity costs and/or those with low efficiency machines, have been forced to plug off their machines.

This is why, while the hashrate hit a new ATH during this consolidation, it couldnt stay there for too long as miners started going offline. However, the hashrate falling off after that lead to a decrease in the difficulty, which incentivized some miners to bring their machines back online.

Naturally, that only lead to a higher hashrate, and hence higher difficulty, which once again made some miners disconnect from the network. And so in this way, both the hashrate and the difficulty have been flipping up and down, ultimately forming a sideways trend.

At the time of writing, Bitcoins price floats around $23.5k, down 5% in the past week. Over the past month, the crypto has gained 13% in value.

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Why The Bitcoin Hashrate Has Barely Moved Since May | Bitcoinist.com - Bitcoinist

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The Shiba Inu price posted a notable advance on Saturday, as the broader cryptocurrency markets slouched into an end-week slump and the Bitcoin price sunk to $21,000.

On Friday, August 19, bitcoin wiped out weeks of gains after plunging to $21,230 as heightened fears about rampant inflation and the possibility of continued monetary hawkishness by the U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks sparked the drop in crypto prices and other riskier assets. The move dashed hopes in recent weeks that the worlds most valuable cryptocurrency might finally stage a strong recovery after the devastating meltdown in May and June.

Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency, had enjoyed a nice uptrend over the past month from ebullience ahead of the fast-approaching Merge upgrade. However, ETH has charted a similar course to bitcoin today, plummeting 5.84% on the day and 18.28% for the week.

One cryptocurrency has stood out as many top-tier coins fall into the red: Shiba Inu (SHIB). The meme coin has leaped by 4.13% on the day to trade at $0.0000134. The so-called Dogecoin killer is up 5.65% on a weekly basis. Its the 12th largest cryptocurrency overall, with a market cap of $7.8 billion.

Although fellow canine-themed crypto Dogecoin has risen 1.4% on the day, it has tumbled by 2.9% over the last seven days.

SHIBs outperformance appears to be linked to a surge in the coins burn rate. Investors burned around 14 million SHIB on August 17, which skyrocketed to over 170 million on August 18, per data from SHIB Burn Tracker an increase of circa 1,000%.

Developers launched the SHIB burn portal in April in a bid to reduce the tokens supply, which could lead to increased prices in the future as it becomes more scarce.

The periodic token burn mechanism incentivizes users to send SHIB tokens to a dead wallet address in return for burntSHIB tokens, which can be staked to generate rewards in the form of RYOSHI tokens.

On the whole, the Shiba Inu network has burned more than 410 trillion SHIB tokens from its initial supply, according to data tracking portal ShibBurn.com.

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Heres Why Shiba Inu Is Surging While Bitcoin Retreats To $21,000 - ZyCrypto

Despite being an automated, decentralized version of a typical cryptocurrency mixer, Tornado Cash was sanctioned by the U.S. government last week as the Treasury Departments Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) added Ethereum addresses associated with the tool to its specially designated nationals and blocked persons (SDN) list.

Much has been written about the legal aspects of the Treasury Departments move. Instead of embarking on arguably much needed advocacy to dispute the legal grounds of such a move, this article seeks to objectively explore the technical intricacies of Tornado Cash and its sanction, as well as evaluate potential risks that could bleed into Bitcoin in the future.

At its core, a mixer receives users cryptocurrency deposits, which it pools or tumbles together before enabling each user to withdraw the same amount of coins it deposited. By doing so, users receive fresh coins that arent related to the ones they deposited, which can offer them a great deal of forward-looking privacy.

Most mixers are centralized, run by an entity or business that collects fees for the aforementioned services.

Tornado Cash, on the other hand, is a cryptocurrency mixer deployed as a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain. Hence, it is more akin to a robot than an entity it can be thought of as an automated version of a typical cryptocurrency mixer. It still works like a regular mixer, though. Users deposit cryptocurrency into the Tornado Cash contract, which pools the funds and enables withdrawals unlinked to the deposits.

Tornado Cash ensures privacy and enables trustless user withdrawals by leveraging robust cryptography techniques, with proofs known as zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge (zk-SNARK) is at its core.

In essence, zk-SNARK and zero-knowledge proofs in general allow an entity to prove a statement about a secret without revealing the secret. In the context of Tornado Cash, it allows the user to prove they are entitled to withdraw a certain amount of coins from the smart contract without handing out information about their deposits.

SNARKs in the context of Tornado Cash allow depositors to move money into the pool and have an off-chain deposit note they can use to withdraw it to any other account, Michael Lewellen, security solutions architect at smart contract security firm OpenZeppelin, told Bitcoin Magazine. The fact that the deposit note has zero ties to the deposit account is where the SNARKs are used to ensure privacy.

Beyond the privacy benefits, the deposit note also allows a greater level of security and control for the user as it enables them to trustlessly withdraw their funds from the mixer at any time. This feature makes Tornado Cash akin to a non-custodial service, as these redeemable notes function as cryptographic keys that unlock the users funds.

I think its still fair to call it non-custodial, Lewellen said. Youre essentially given a new cryptographic key proof related to that specific deposit that can then be used by the withdrawing account to pull the money out.

Cryptocurrency mixers have for years been targeted by the U.S. government and its enforcement agencies. One would think that Tornado Cash, being a piece of code autonomously living on a blockchain instead of a centrally-run business, would be immune to such targeting. Still, OFAC came after it.

The idea that the U.S. Treasury Departments can sanction a smart contract cryptocurrency mixer like Tornado Cash seems far fetched and odd.However, it sits at the intersection of the departments previous sanctions of cryptocurrency mixers (in reasoning) and blockchain addresses (in approach).

The sanctioning of Tornado Cash represents OFACs second-ever sanction on a cryptocurrency mixer. The first, on Blender, happened in May 2022.

OFAC said in a statement that Tornado Cash has been used to launder more than $7 billion worth of virtual currency since its creation in 2019, highlighting the alleged funneling of over $455 million stolen by the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK)-sponsored Lazarus hacking group, which was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2019.

More specifically, the statement details:

Tornado is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13694, as amended, for having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of, a cyber-enabled activity originating from, or directed by persons located, in whole or in substantial part, outside the United States that is reasonably likely to result in, or has materially contributed to, a significant threat to the national security, foreign policy, or economic health or financial stability of the United States and that has the purpose or effect of causing a significant misappropriation of funds or economic resources, trade secrets, personal identifiers, or financial information for commercial or competitive advantage or private financial gain.

According to the U.S. Treasury Departments website, Executive Order (E.O.) 13694 focuses on harms caused by malicious cyber-enabled activities, which it judges as any act that is primarily accomplished through or facilitated by computers or other electronic devices. It directs the Secretary of the Treasury to impose sanctions on the persons he or she determines to be responsible for, or complicit in, the activities leading to those harms.

Blenders sanction was also pursuant to E.O. 13694. Tornado Cashs situation, however, raised some eyebrows because of the many nuances involved in its sanction.

Tornado Cash is a mixer, and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) considers mixers to be money transmitters hence being susceptible to regulations and enforcement. At the same time, however, Tornado Cash is open-source code, and the U.S. ruled in Bernstein v. Department of Justice in the 1990s that code is speech. Hence the paradox.

Putting the paradox and legal nuances aside, things which might take years to dispute, in practice OFAC might have simply looked at a cryptocurrency mixer being used to launder illegal funds and decided to crack down on it regardless of the distributed nature of the tool.

Even though OFACs SDN list is more often than not leveraged for persons or entities, the Treasury Department has, since 2018, spelled out that it can and will add cryptocurrency addresses to the list as it deems necessary to protect U.S. national security interests.

To strengthen our efforts to combat the illicit use of digital currency transactions under our existing authorities, OFAC may include as identifiers on the SDN List specific digital currency addresses associated with blocked persons, per the Treasury Department website. OFAC may add digital currency addresses to the SDN List to alert the public of specific digital currency identifiers associated with a blocked person.

Counterintuitively, and heres the hard truth, the transparent nature of blockchains more broadly along with specific characteristics of the Ethereum blockchain facilitated the Treasury Department to overextend its authority and mingle reasoning and approach to add Tornado Cash to the SDN list.

Ethereum leverages a model based on accounts. According to the Ethereum foundation, an account is an entity with an ether (ETH) balance that can send transactions on Ethereum and it can be either user-controlled or a smart contract. Accounts can receive, hold and send ETH and tokens on the Ethereum blockchain as well as interact with smart contracts.

As a default, deployed smart contracts on Ethereum have a fixed address which other accounts, owned by users or other contracts, can interact with. Therefore, since OFAC can sanction blockchain addresses through its SDN list, it was trivial for the enforcement body to sanction Tornado Cash.

So, is it then just a matter of time until OFAC or similar organizations begin coming after tools in Bitcoin land?

There is arguably little limit to what enforcement agencies such as OFAC can do to reach their objectives, as evidenced by the Tornado Cash case. But many decentralized tools were built in response to the states overarching control in the first place and are designed to prevent such actions.

Does that mean Bitcoin is immune to the threats that the Ethereum ecosystem is currently facing? Not necessarily.

As explained above, and judging by the Treasury Departments statements and guidelines, OFACs sanction on Tornado Cash appears to have been a coupling of two of the agencys practices: the goal of cracking down on virtual currency mixers facilitating money laundering and its ability to add blockchain addresses to its SDN list. Bitcoin is well positioned to mitigate against the former, and while the latter poses a real threat, this is where Nakamotos design proves more resilient. Heres why.

Bitcoin privacy tools, namely CoinJoins, are also leveraged by criminals to launder money which also puts them on the radar of regulators.

Earlier this year, the U.K.s National Crime Agency (NCA) called for the regulation of Bitcoin CoinJoins, erroneously calling them decentralized mixers and citing Samourai and Wasabi wallets as two well-known mixers, per a report by the Financial Times. The agency claimed that such tools allow users to disguise transactions that are otherwise traceable on blockchains.

The NCA said regulation would force mixers to comply with money laundering laws, with an obligation to carry out customer checks and audit trails of currencies passing through the platforms, per the report.

As highlighted on Samourai Wallets follow-up blog post, there should be a clear distinction between a mixer and a CoinJoin as they are different tools.

While a mixer functions in the typical depositpoolwithdraw format, a CoinJoin is nothing more than a Bitcoin transaction. It differs from typical Bitcoin transactions because CoinJoins are really large ones with a specific format, but software like Samourai and Wasabi enable only the coordination of users to form that same transaction. In other words, there is no deposit, pooling or withdrawal of funds.

In fact, the EUs most prominent law enforcement agency, Europol, makes a clear distinction between mixers and CoinJoins. In its latest two Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment (IOCTA) reports, Europols flagship strategic product that provides a law enforcement-focused assessment of evolving threats and developments in the area of cybercrime, the agency did not bundle mixers and CoinJoins into the same basket.

Criminals are increasingly converting their illicit earnings made in Bitcoin using cryptocurrency obfuscation methods like swapping services, mixers and coinjoins, it said in its 2021 IOCTA report. ...In the last few years, many different obfuscation methods have gained popularity, such as mixers, CoinJoin, swapping, crypto debit cards, Bitcoin ATMs, local trade and more.

Furthermore, in a 2020 report on Wasabi, Europol stated that users who download the wallet store all bitcoins locally, which means that the AML legislation including Europes latest AMLD5 (the 5th anti-money laundering directive) does not apply to this service.

Therefore, at the present time, it seems rather unlikely that the Treasury Department or other enforcement agencies would crack down on Bitcoin CoinJoins as cryptocurrency mixers and add them to the OFAC SDN list. But lets entertain the possibility that said agencies choose to do so.

Assuming that enforcement agencies can extend their authority to fit their needs, CoinJoins can come under sanctioning threats. But how could that be done? While there are no clear answers to that question, some possible scenarios do emerge.

The first natural scenario is an enforcement agency banning CoinJoins altogether. However unlikely, and while it would actually mean banning multiple-party Bitcoin transactions, such an action can in theory still be done. This threat, however, is sentient and the same threat that existed and arguably still exists for Bitcoin at large.

Perhaps a more down-to-earth scenario would be the sanctioning of CoinJoins coordinators instead. While this isnt applicable to JoinMarket in a straightforward way, given its maker and taker structure, in the cases of Samourai and Wasabi there are central coordinators that facilitate the CoinJoin transaction that is performed between the transacting parties. (This type of sanction is still unlikely given the structure of CoinJoins and as evidenced by Europols statement saying that AML rules dont apply to these tools. But, again, lets suppose the contrary.)

The action of sanctioning coordinators could be similar to the sanctioning of Tornado Cash in theory, but its very different in practice.

While OFAC, for instance, could simply add a CoinJoins coordinator to its SDN list, there is no single blockchain address it could use to represent that coordinator. As a gift from Bitcoins unspent transaction output (UTXO) model, coordinators change their address each round. This means that with Bitcoin CoinJoins there is no single point of contact to the Bitcoin blockchain and therefore this poses a key difference to Tornado Cashs smart contract structure based on Ethereums account based system.

In practice, OFAC would need to continuously analyze the blockchain to spot Bitcoin CoinJoins and retroactively add addresses to the SDN list. (There is one aspect that washes OFACs hands in this case it makes it clear that the SDN list is not exhaustive, meaning that if an address thats not listed is found to belong to an entity that is on the list, the sanction would still apply.)

Beyond the retroactive enforcement of such rules, the enforcement body would also need to know the identities of the Bitcoin users leveraging the services. While it is true that Bitcoin transactions and addresses arent anonymous, Bitcoins UTXO model increases robustness and resilience against this as well and most of the chain analysis work relies on (sometimes educated) guesses. This would be truly effective only if the addresses going in are either publicly known (for example from known hacks or hackers) or KYCd (known to exchanges and therefore law enforcement).

However, the fact that there is no direct or reliable way to tell which coordinator was used in a given CoinJoin round poses further challenges. While it can often be plausible to assume that the default coordinator was used in a round, such a statement cannot be reliably used against users because nothing prevents users from creating and using different coordinators, with the only obstacle being liquidity which can be solved with time.

If legislation turns around and decides CoinJoins should fall under the same rules as mixers despite their striking differences, and the above actions by enforcement agencies turn out to be successful or at least effective enough there are still a couple of possible nonexclusive avenues that hold the potential to bring about an outcome different than what Tornado Cash is facing.

First, business entities running the coordinators could attempt to prevent illegal funds to be CoinJoined. Wasabi Wallet is seeking such a reality with its zkSNACKs coordinator, according to an announcement from earlier this year. It isnt clear whether Wasabi has implemented this feature yet. (This is a complicated and hardly positive path for the ecosystem as a whole, however, because it enables regulatory overreach on tools that are not money transmitters and which regulators and enforcement agencies themselves realize at present should not be subject to AML rules.)

A second and arguably better option would be leveraging even more decentralized CoinJoin tools such as JoinMarket. Even though it isnt a perfect implementation, as highlighted by Shinobi in this article, JoinMarket presents a great option for Bitcoin users to embark on CoinJoins in a catastrophic scenario such as the above. It is even more resilient than centrally-coordinated CoinJoins, meaning it would amplify all the enforcement challenges posed by the likes of Samourai and Wasabi, and spotting JoinMarket CoinJoin transactions on-chain is in and of itself already more challenging and can lead to false positives.

On a different note, OFACs sanction of Tornado Cash has also created additional problems in a cascading effect that are worth considering when it comes to potential sanctions on Bitcoin. One of the contributors to the Tornado Cash open-source code was arrested following the sanction; Tornado Cashs GitHub account and of some of its developers were shut down; and the website for Tornado Cash was taken down.

It isnt yet clear why the developer was arrested, but Bitcoin Magazine contacted GitHub to learn more about the accounts shutdown.

Trade laws require GitHub to restrict users and customers identified as Specially Designated Nationals (SDNs) or other denied or blocked parties, or that may be using GitHub on behalf of blocked parties, a GitHub spokesperson told Bitcoin Magazine. At the same time, GitHubs vision is to be the global platform for developer collaboration. We examine government sanctions thoroughly to be certain that users and customers are not impacted beyond what is required by law.

Bitcoin Magazine inquired further but received the same response as above.

Therefore it is clear that Bitcoin, and any open-source project for that matter, may suffer from the same GitHub accounts shutdown in the event of an OFAC sanction. However, as highlighted by the community in forums and Twitter, some options also exist to mitigate this threat such as self-hosted GitLab instances.

Still, another difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum also plays a role here. While in the ecosystem of the latter centralized tools play a bigger role in its decentralized offerings for example Infura, which powers most of the Ethereum apps, wallets and services and is susceptible to sanctions and censorship the former is better positioned to sustain similar threats.

In sum, Bitcoin is arguably the most well-prepared network to withstand nation-state attacks given the intricacies of its design, some of which were explored in-depth in this article. Moreover, challenges to the enforcement of possible sanctions on Bitcoin privacy tools make such an action not only unlikely but seemingly futile to be undertaken as its efficacy might simply not be amplified compared to what is done today regarding money laundering with Bitcoin and CoinJoins. Finally, the unlikelihood of such an event is further exacerbated by the unique characteristics of CoinJoins and the structural differences their implementation poses to mixing.

This article mainly focuses on the probable reasoning behind OFACs sanction on Tornado Cash to imagine how such a sanction could be ported onto Bitcoin and its tools. But it wouldnt be fair to leave out a commentary on what has likely been an overextension of regulatory oversight.

As highlighted by several industry players and businesses, the sanction of open-source code might be an infringement on the Constitutional First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, and, as mentioned previously, code has been established as speech under U.S. law. Moreover, any attack on open-source code is an attack on Bitcoin.

Additionally, the sanctioning of Tornado Cash altogether has negative implications to law-abiding citizens that leveraged the tool to protect their legitimate privacy interests, as explained by Seth Hertlein, global head of policy at hardware wallet maker Ledger.

All in all, as already mentioned, while regulators shouldnt overextend their statutory authority, litigation can take years. Furthermore, given that legislation is dependent on jurisdiction, what is legal or illegal is geographically subjective. Consequently, decentralized systems should be designed from the ground up to withstand capture or overreach with unstoppable, uncensorable networks.

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Now That Authorities Have Shut Down Tornado Cash, Is Bitcoin Next? - Bitcoin Magazine