August 4, 2017
Hartley West, Benjamin Sauter and Beau Barnes filed an amicus brief August 3 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Coin Center's behalf, opposing a broad Internal Revenue Service request for Coinbase customer financial records.
Coin Center — a Washington, DC-based independent, nonprofit research center focused on the public policy issues facing digital currency technologies, such as Bitcoin and others — argued that granting the IRS’s request would result in “no meaningful judicial check in place to stop the IRS from using the John Doe summons process to collect the personal records of every person who had bought or sold stocks on the New York Stock Exchange, art within a given time period from Sotheby’s, or rare books from City Lights Booksellers, or made cash deposits or withdrawals at Bank of America.”