I did a bit more research and thinking about this. The First Amendment doesn't apply here. The government doesn't care about the artistic, persuasive, or expressive character of the works, just their function. There is no First Amendment right to speech that can actually make a gun just as there is no First Amendment right to speech that can actually hire a hitman. In cases where artistic expression or persuasion is significantly burdened, there might be an as-applied challenge on First Amendment grounds.

Is there any recognized exception to the first amendment that allows the government to prohibit the distribution of accurate information on the grounds that it's dangerous to use or misuse? If not, and they're asking for a new exception to the first amendment, the minimum we should expect is a precise description of the contours of the exception.

So how do you buy a car if no bank or financial institution is willing to do business with you? If the government is going to pass laws requiring you to do business with banks and FIs to live a normal life, surely they can't continue to allow banks and FIs to pick and choose their customers arbitrarily.

> This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently about 300,000 transactions per day). Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week.

That's just being silly. Imagine a company that has three vice presidents and spends $1 billion per year. I can say that company spends "over $300 million per vice president per year". But, of course, that's nonsense because there's no sensible reason to divide the yearly cost by the number of vice presidents. They can't fire one vice president to save $300 million per year nor would it cost them $300 million to add another vice president. So what's the sense of this?

Similarly, there is simply no sensible reason to divide the energy cost by the number of transactions. Reducing the number of transactions won't reduce the energy cost and increasing the number won't increase it. The energy used by bitcoin mining and the number of bitcoin transactions performed are pretty much completely independent and there is simply no reason to divide one by the other.

I suspect that they added NewEgg to the suit because they figured that Moneual would point the finger at NewEgg if they just sued Moneual. The best way to ensure that NewEgg shows up in the courtroom to solidly place the blame on Moneual is to sue NewEgg too.

His argument would work equally to defend requiring every home builder to include a recording device in every home so that law enforcement could, with a subpeona or warrant, access the recordings to investigate crimes.

Is deliberately misleading people free speech? Absolutely.

Is speech whose primary purpose is to solicit a commercial transaction generally accepted as an exception to free speech? Yes.

Is fraud speech? No, but misleading speech is just one element of fraud.

No. That's called a heckler's veto and that is completely rejected by US law. Otherwise, I could stop anyone from speaking by reacting violently to their speech.

Actually, incitement of violence is protected speech in the United States. There's a very limited subcategory of incitement that's not protected, but it's not nearly as broad as you are implying. One can, for example, say "All left handed people should be killed as soon as we know they're left handed" and that is not incitement. On the other hand, if you're surrounded by a mob of people who are likely to kill left handed people, you cannot shout, "That guy in the blue hat is left handed, get him!"

So then net neutrality isn't a free speech issue either, right?

Cloudflare has made it clear that they will investigate illegal activity and shut people down for it. If by "incitement", you mean its actual legal definition, then you agree with Cloudflare's position. Or is "incitement" is code for "say things I really don't like"?

Nothing you said contradicts anything that I said.

You having reason to believe they would abuse it does not matter. You can sell a hammer to someone even if you have reason to believe they might use it to harm someone. The issue is whether you intended the harm or abuse or whether you conspired with them to commit the crime.

> In the case of Hutchins, his product is by design intended to be used in a way that is always illegal, so creating it in concert with someone who intends to use the product is being part of a conspiracy to commit illegal acts.

What if a court authorized the use of the malware to gather evidence? In what way is the malware's design not perfect for that type of use too?

> If someone is selling a tool that has only illegal uses, it is pretty certain that the mind of the customer is known.

I don't think there's any such thing as "a tool that has only illegal uses", unless you're talking about something that's illegal to possess. A person might want malware to:

1) Test their skills at analyzing malware.

2) Test their own defenses against malware.

3) Perform lawful intercepts on their own equipment.

4) Analyze to fingerprint to add additional detection patterns to existing malware detection systems.

5) Own for bragging rights.

6) Use by law enforcement pursuant to a warrant.