Why Bitcoin Matters for Freedom
In the border city of Cúcuta, Venezuelan refugees stream into Colombia, searching for food to feed their families. Years of high inflation, projected to top 1 million percent, has turned bolivares into scrap paper. More than 3 million Venezuelans have fled since 2014, and 5,500 exit for good each day. According to the United Nations, the exodus is “on the scale of Syria” and is now one of the world’s worst refugee crises. As Venezuelans escape, they leave with close to nothing, desperate and vulnerable.
Because they live under authoritarianism, Venezuelans have no way to reform the policies that have destroyed their economy. They can’t hold their rulers accountable through free and fair elections or campaign for change without fear of reprisal. As they stand in hours-long lines for rationed groceries and medicine and watch their life savings disappear, it can seem like there are no options.
But innovation happens at the edge. Today, Venezuelans are adopting and experimenting with Bitcoin to evade hyperinflation and strict financial controls. Speculation, fraud, and greed in the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry have overshadowed the real, liberating potential of Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention. For people living under authoritarian governments, Bitcoin can be a valuable financial tool as a censorship-resistant medium of exchange.
Take, for example, remittances. After ravaging the domestic economy, the Venezuelan regime is now taking a cut of money coming in from abroad. New laws force Venezuelans to go through local banks for foreign transactions, and require banks to disclose information on how individuals get and use their money. According to Alejandro Machado, a cryptocurrency researcher at the Open Money Initiative, a wire transfer from the United States can now encounter a fee as high as 56% as it passes from dollars to bolivares in a process that can last several weeks. Most recently, Venezuelan banks have, under pressure from the government, even prevented clients using foreign IP addresses from accessing their online accounts.
To circumvent this bureaucracy, some Venezuelans have started to receive bitcoin from their relatives abroad. It’s now possible to send a text message to your family asking for bitcoin, and receive it minutes later for a tiny fee. Government censorship isn’t possible, as bitcoin isn’t routed through a bank or third party and instead arrives into your phone wallet in a peer-to-peer way. Then you can, moments later, sell your new bitcoin into fiat through a local Craigslist-style exchange, or load it onto a flash drive (or even memorize a recovery phrase) and escape Venezuela with complete control over your savings. A popular alternative – have your family wire money to a bank in Colombia, walk across the border to withdraw, then walk back to Venezuela with cash in hand – can take far longer, cost more, and be far more dangerous than the Bitcoin option.
Venezuela isn’t the only place where people can use Bitcoin as an escape valve. In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe printed endless amounts of cash and inflated the savings of his citizens into nothing, but his successors can’t print more bitcoin. In China, Xi Jinping can track all of your transactions on Alipay and WePay, but he cannot orchestrate mass surveillance on all Bitcoin payments. In Russia, Vladimir Putin can target an NGO and freeze its bank account, but he can’t freeze its Bitcoin wallet. In a refugee camp, you might not be able to access a bank, but as long as you can find an Internet connection, you can receive bitcoin, without asking permission and without having to prove your identity.
Naturally, we must pay attention to the dark side of emerging technology. Public intellectuals like Yuval Noah Harari and Elon Musk have warned that artificial intelligence and big data could strengthen tyrants and authoritarians around the world. Regimes in Venezuela, Iran, and Saudi Arabia are even trying to mutate and centralize Bitcoin’s concept of peer-to-peer digital money to create state-controlled cryptocurrencies like the Petro, which could allow them to more effectively censor transactions, surveil user accounts, and evade sanctions.
But decentralizing technologies can provide a countering force. Beyond Bitcoin, there are encrypted communications apps and browsers like Signal and Tor, privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies like Zcash and Monero, mesh networking devices like goTenna, and censorship-resistant storage systems like IPFS. By building on and investing in tools like these, we can ensure that our cities, social networks, and financial systems don’t turn into tools of surveillance and control.
Cash remains one of the best ways to exercise free speech. Paper or metal money is virtually anonymous, and can be used without government surveillance. But in places like Venezuela, where bills are weighed in stacks by the kilogram even for small transactions, cash is increasingly impractical, and it’s vulnerable to theft or seizure. And from China to Sweden, governments and companies are driving us toward a cashless world. It’s essential that we explore electronic money that can preserve the peer-to-peer quality of cash for future generations. When you pay someone with software like Venmo, you might use three or four financial intermediaries, even though the recipient might be standing in front of you. Each intermediary can potentially censor, surveil, and profit. And the billions of humans living under repressive regimes can’t expect most payment software in the future to remain as innocent or benevolent as Venmo. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb has written, Bitcoin is “an insurance policy against an Orwellian future.”
To be sure, Bitcoin is still a nascent technology, and doesn’t offer cutting-edge usability, speed, or privacy. But engineers are constantly working to bring those attributes to Bitcoin by building better apps and on-ramps, upgrading the base protocol, and creating new second layer technologies like the Lightning Network, which could eventually mask and dramatically scale the number of possible bitcoin transactions per second. In the same way that the mobile phone began as absurdly expensive, barely functional, and only available to the elite, Bitcoin continues to evolve and will become easier to use and more accessible for the masses in the future.
Less than 1% of the world’s population — no more than 40 million people — have ever used Bitcoin. But, according to the Human Rights Foundation, more than 50% of the world’s population lives under an authoritarian regime. If we invest the time and resources to develop user-friendly wallets, more exchanges, and better educational materials for Bitcoin, it has the potential to make a real difference for the 4 billion people who can’t trust their rulers or who can’t access the banking system. For them, Bitcoin can be a way out.
ферма bitcoin отзывы ethereum bitcoin hash
battle bitcoin
bitcoin расчет bitcoin компания bitcoin exchanges block ethereum goldmine bitcoin заработок ethereum bitcoin автоматически keys bitcoin p2pool ethereum
tether usd bitcoin scanner coinmarketcap bitcoin magic bitcoin txid ethereum bitcoin конвертер exchange ethereum bitcoin electrum bitcoin script ethereum algorithm значок bitcoin bitcoin testnet трейдинг bitcoin bitcoin scripting bitcoin пожертвование bitcoin ваучер ledger bitcoin bitcoin motherboard
кошельки bitcoin bitcoin автосборщик bitcoin best кошелька ethereum bitcoin in
charts bitcoin flypool monero bitcoin nasdaq bitcoin принимаем создатель ethereum collector bitcoin sgminer monero greenaddress bitcoin терминал bitcoin
cryptocurrency bitcoin formula rigname ethereum monero usd bitcoin биржи bitcoin golden bitcoin login bitcoin com
cms bitcoin monero difficulty играть bitcoin monero биржи bitcoin venezuela иконка bitcoin zcash bitcoin capitalization bitcoin carding bitcoin bitcoin onecoin bitcoin dogecoin bitcoin игры monero amd bitcoin mac bitcoin client bitcoin example bitcoin lurk куплю ethereum порт bitcoin bitcoin картинки bitcoin trader monero address bitcoin tor краны ethereum ethereum crane bitcoin ios bitcoin gif maining bitcoin ethereum asics инструкция bitcoin bcc bitcoin bitcoin escrow вебмани bitcoin россия bitcoin bitcoin knots love bitcoin партнерка bitcoin bitcoin kazanma reddit bitcoin 6000 bitcoin bitcoin stiller key bitcoin bitcoin blender alliance bitcoin ethereum токены cardano cryptocurrency What is blockchain?ethereum script что bitcoin
bitcoin antminer
bitcoin cny
китай bitcoin china bitcoin
trader bitcoin
avto bitcoin автокран bitcoin
copay bitcoin cranes bitcoin monero сложность bitcoin цены fpga bitcoin bitcoin сатоши monero free bitcoin 123 bonus bitcoin bitcoin инструкция ethereum blockchain автоматический bitcoin bitcoin hardfork tether android First, Bitcoin at its most fundamental level is a breakthrough in computer science – one that builds on 20 years of research into cryptographic currency, and 40 years of research in cryptography, by thousands of researchers around the world.блокчейн bitcoin ethereum code bitcoin people
проверка bitcoin bitcoin кран
bitcoin pps javascript bitcoin
connect bitcoin bitcoin youtube bitcoin эмиссия bitcoin форки bitcoin api bitcoin сбербанк eobot bitcoin mini bitcoin книга bitcoin usb bitcoin c bitcoin hosting bitcoin china cryptocurrency сбербанк bitcoin торрент bitcoin bitcoin redex algorithm bitcoin bitcoin darkcoin monero hardware bitcoin knots
иконка bitcoin
обзор bitcoin bitcoin bbc bitcoin machine cryptocurrency exchange bitcoin список сервисы bitcoin
logo bitcoin bitcoin easy ethereum poloniex символ bitcoin bitcoin chart bitcointalk bitcoin bitcoin millionaire 1 ethereum cranes bitcoin bitcoin word bitcoin daily перевод ethereum bitcoin pps мавроди bitcoin neo cryptocurrency bitcoin wiki monero core bitcoin зебра bitcoin обналичивание Eobot Review: Start cloud mining Bitcoin with as little as $10. Eobot claims customers can break even in 14 months.фото bitcoin Blockchain can be used in multiple fields such as business, government, healthcare, etc. while Hyperledger is primarily used for enterprise-based solutions. Wherever we talk about public Blockchain, it refers to the usage of Blockchain on the internet, and Hyperledger-based Blockchain solutions are solutions meant for usage on the intranet, within an organization.10000 bitcoin monero news bitcoin billionaire bitcoin drip bitcoin телефон форк bitcoin android tether bitcoin kran bitcoin main bitcoin putin monero курс hashrate ethereum ethereum complexity blog bitcoin tp tether bitcoin qazanmaq bitcoin laundering bitcoin formula micro bitcoin
халява bitcoin script bitcoin pay bitcoin space bitcoin bitcoin yandex ethereum homestead кран bitcoin дешевеет bitcoin bitcoin msigna bitcoin mastercard monero ico bitcoin играть bitcoin darkcoin bitcoin cap decred ethereum bitcoin farm инструкция bitcoin game bitcoin bitcoin payoneer bitcoin прогноз golden bitcoin cryptocurrency arbitrage bitcoin rpg порт bitcoin
freeman bitcoin monero продать
bitcoin rub bitcoin автосерфинг bitcoin tor transaction bitcoin ethereum contracts bitcoin рейтинг fork bitcoin криптовалюта ethereum de bitcoin bitcoin status bitcoin database bitcoin форк monero xmr bitcoin dark краны monero bitcoin easy bitcoin реклама eDonkeybitcoin multiplier ethereum info шахты bitcoin ethereum crane
bitcoin blue collector bitcoin ethereum логотип bitcoin dollar bitcoin ставки пулы monero zcash bitcoin bitcoin получить bitcoin безопасность
claymore monero
kurs bitcoin стоимость ethereum decred cryptocurrency bitcoin foundation If the price of Ethereum does go up in the near future, I would recommend locking in your profits when you see them, because nothing in the future is guaranteed. Even though you may see the price going up, it could just as easily start to go down again.ethereum майнить panda bitcoin 9000 bitcoin android tether
bitcoin rub bitcoin mining
ethereum пул ethereum логотип decred ethereum bitcoin видеокарты bitcoin иконка магазин bitcoin bitcoin кредиты ethereum markets
bitcoin stock bitcoin foto bitcoin ann
bitcoin adress cryptocurrency wallets bitcoin school биржа bitcoin bitcoin flip seed bitcoin tether wifi ethereum node андроид bitcoin вложить bitcoin bitcoin презентация bitcoin fpga trade cryptocurrency технология bitcoin bitcoin cards trade cryptocurrency bitcoin playstation заработать monero bitcoin minergate reklama bitcoin bitcoin etherium андроид bitcoin bcc bitcoin bitcoin россия bitcoin masters ethereum raiden bitcoin sportsbook mercado bitcoin bitcoin баланс love bitcoin bitcoin gpu clockworkmod tether код bitcoin
биржа ethereum стоимость monero баланс bitcoin
торги bitcoin bitcoin cudaminer asics bitcoin bux bitcoin bitcoin global
сети ethereum bitcoin кредит bitcoin зебра bitcoin casino ethereum chaindata ethereum курсы ethereum майнить кошельки ethereum
ethereum nicehash bitcoin best bitcoin motherboard bitcoin конвектор bitcoin миллионеры bitcoin dance reddit bitcoin monero gui ethereum упал новости ethereum dance bitcoin tether gps
футболка bitcoin
wisdom bitcoin ethereum dag Accounts can be frozen, or their balance partially or wholly confiscated.ethereum habrahabr bitcoin hyip transactions bitcoin fields bitcoin p2pool monero компания bitcoin bitcoin coinmarketcap blitz bitcoin bitcoin etf 99 bitcoin ethereum solidity инвестирование bitcoin bitcoin unlimited
bitcoin msigna взлом bitcoin график bitcoin bitcoin cny bitcoin trojan bitcoin торговля bittorrent bitcoin добыча monero bitcoin казино bitcoin машины programming bitcoin Still an Option B — Traditional centralized cryptocurrency exchanges are generally much more popular than decentralized ones and as a result often have many more users and active trades. Centralized exchanges also tend to have more money behind them and can afford a better user experience, customer support, and a sense of professionalism.Bitcoin ATMs1080 ethereum nicehash bitcoin
хабрахабр bitcoin multiply bitcoin bitcoin hub bitcoin символ testnet ethereum bitcoin fund dollar bitcoin bitcoin instant nicehash bitcoin bitcoin pps
monero биржи bitcoin knots bitcoin index сайт ethereum 22 bitcoin пример bitcoin mineable cryptocurrency bitcoin видеокарта котировки ethereum bitcoin блок bitcoin форекс fpga ethereum china bitcoin
bitcoin pools monero client bitcoin antminer monero coin
ethereum перевод ethereum курсы fast bitcoin
bitcoin github planet bitcoin
exchange bitcoin facebook bitcoin
ethereum dao accepts bitcoin love bitcoin bitcoin ocean шифрование bitcoin bitcoin bear bitcoin c tp tether monero simplewallet monero proxy putin bitcoin ethereum raiden bitcoin download
bitcoin flapper bitcoin airbit magic bitcoin bitcoin bat cryptocurrency exchanges bitcoin instagram ethereum miner Cryptocurrencies are usually not issued or controlled by any government or other central authority. They’re managed by peer-to-peer networks of computers running free, open-source software. Generally, anyone who wants to participate is able to.bitcoin иконка bitcoin mining ethereum russia earn bitcoin
криптовалюту monero bitcoin apple bitcoin иконка ethereum видеокарты tether программа avalon bitcoin wifi tether daemon monero
bitcoin market monero краны е bitcoin шифрование bitcoin
bitcoin компьютер
gemini bitcoin bitcoin рублей
fpga ethereum bitcoin 4 pool monero ethereum complexity bitcoin пузырь ethereum упал bitcoin бот bitcoin майнить dwarfpool monero pow bitcoin ethereum decred калькулятор monero заработка bitcoin bitcoin разделился