最新报道：This is an excerpt from the Supply Shock newsletter. To read the full version, please subscribe. It’s satisfying to think that Bitcoin has won out. After all, the current president of the United States is a big fan himself. Meanwhile, regulators, at least publicly, don’t care too much, while many of Wall Street’s big operators support bitcoin trading and even offer ETFs directly to their customer base. The U.S. Strategic Reserve is the final icing on the cake: Bitcoin—both the asset and the underlying blockchain—is now officially intertwined with the health of federal finances, even if the connection is minuscule compared to gold. It sounds optimistic. But it’s enough to make any cypherpunk with a membership card feel a little nervous. There’s plenty of precedent for governments wanting to monitor cryptocurrencies and personal data. Thirty years ago, activists were preparing to rally against a new Senate bill that would make the crypto tools we know today completely illegal. On June 27, 1995, Senator Chuck Grassley introduced the so-called “Anti-Wireshark Act.” At the time, Grassley was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Administrative Oversight Subcommittee. Today, he is president pro tempore of the Senate, third in line to the presidency after the vice president and speaker of the House. Grassley sought to build on the Clinton administration’s existing efforts to ensure that the government could decrypt any and all encrypted communications indefinitely, arguing that it was to protect society from criminals and other bad actors who might want to hide their misdeeds from authorities. At the time, the administration was pushing for a government-backed hardware encryption system called Clipper Chip, which used a classified encryption algorithm called Skipjack. This implementation would have required two U.S. government agencies to retain copies of all encryption keys associated with Skipjack. This was supposed to become a national standard for secure voice and data communications, but the public itself was not mandated to use Skipjack. Grassley’s bill went further, making it a crime to use computers to facilitate fraud, particularly through the lens of encryption. The most offensive provision was to provide a “universal decoding device” for any encryption method, which would need to be shared with the Department of Justice—meaning that the only legal forms of encryption were those that could be easily decrypted by the U.S. government. The proposed law would also make it a crime to distribute encryption software without backdoors over any network accessible to foreign nationals, including, of course, the Internet. U.S. authorities are considering whether to prosecute legendary cypherpunk Phil Zimmermann for creating and disseminating the source code for Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), one of the first encryption tools available to the public. PGP’s source code was uploaded online and printed in book form to circumvent U.S. export restrictions that were at the heart of the crypto wars of the ’90s. After years of investigation, charges were never brought against Zimmermann. Grassley’s bill never passed, thanks in large part to fierce condemnation from technology professionals, academics, and activist groups—including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Association for Responsible Computer Professionals, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, among others. Obviously, Bitcoin couldn’t exist if the U.S. government had a secret backdoor to everyone’s private keys. It’s not inconceivable that officials might wish a backdoor were possible during the past decade and a half of discussion. The conversation around encryption has clearly evolved since 1995. So has Bitcoin over the past five years. But in a world where Bitcoin is on par with gold or oil for the most powerful governments on Earth in terms of strategic and economic importance, would those governments be inclined to sit on the sidelines? Perhaps Bitcoin isn’t subject to that degree of influence. But it likely won’t be self-evident — just like Grassley’s bill. Get news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:The Breakdown: Decoding crypto and markets. Daily. Empire: Crypto news and analysis to kickstart your day. Forward Guidance: The intersection of crypto, macroeconomics, and policy. 0xResearch: Get Alpha straight to your inbox. Lightspeed: All about Solana. The Drop: Apps, games, memes, and more. Supply Shock: Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin.