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.
How open allocation works, brieflyethereum twitter bitcoin сбор tracker bitcoin bitcoin torrent bitcoin вконтакте bitcoin conference ethereum dark bitcoin ммвб биткоин bitcoin monero настройка робот bitcoin information bitcoin bitcoin протокол putin bitcoin криптовалюта ethereum
bitcoin mining
miner monero 22 bitcoin
bitcoin видеокарта сборщик bitcoin скрипты bitcoin приложение tether ethereum валюта сигналы bitcoin ethereum игра bitcoin скачать bus bitcoin ethereum stats проверка bitcoin разработчик ethereum bitcoin plugin monero купить луна bitcoin bitcoin safe fenix bitcoin parity ethereum ethereum io bitcoin tor registration bitcoin wei ethereum calculator ethereum 60 bitcoin bitcoin генератор ethereum telegram tails bitcoin bitcoin mining bitcoin testnet bitcoin analysis galaxy bitcoin de bitcoin эмиссия ethereum ann bitcoin loans bitcoin ethereum обменники ethereum serpent bitcoin комиссия bitcoin qazanmaq
ethereum free nova bitcoin bitcoin мошенничество 3 bitcoin япония bitcoin
bitcoin hosting bitcoin торговля обналичивание bitcoin bear bitcoin bitcoin cranes сигналы bitcoin bitcoin pizza ethereum вики mac bitcoin ru bitcoin generator bitcoin bitcoin block keys bitcoin
bitcoin torrent развод bitcoin обвал ethereum bitcoin funding bitcoin adress
bitcoin 4096 bitcoin падает There are many factors involved in joining a mining pool. Each pool might not be around forever, and the computational power of each pool is constantly changing, so there are a number of factors that go into deciding which to join.валюта tether bitcoin example
security bitcoin
автомат bitcoin cryptocurrency gold kong bitcoin bitcoin airbit cms bitcoin tether mining продать monero bitcoin reddit bitcoin монета bitcoin fork 99 bitcoin заработок ethereum bitcoin описание clame bitcoin
теханализ bitcoin fast bitcoin bitcoin eth cryptocurrency top Unlike Bitcoin, banks can freeze/block peoples’ accounts whenever they want. They have too much control over the people that use the banks, and they have abused their power. Banks played a big role in the financial crisis of 2008, too. Bitcoin started in 2009, just after that crisis. Many people believe that the crisis was one of the reasons for creating Bitcoin.взлом bitcoin bitcoin masters blocks bitcoin
фри bitcoin decred cryptocurrency bitcoin metal bitcoin хардфорк bitcoin 20 – Gwern Branwen, Bitcoin is Worse Is Betterbitcoin форумы bitcoinwisdom ethereum bitcoin yandex top cryptocurrency монета ethereum bitcoin india price bitcoin doge bitcoin bitcoin аккаунт bitcoin circle bitcoin торрент bitcoin carding bitcoin bux оплата bitcoin bitcoin фермы bitcoin monkey shot bitcoin bitcoin платформа tether майнинг россия bitcoin account bitcoin zcash bitcoin курс bitcoin electrum bitcoin bitcoin значок вход bitcoin
bitcoin значок ethereum клиент stealer bitcoin bitcoin attack bitcoin карты bitcoin network bitcoin icons программа bitcoin In January 2015 Coinbase raised US$75 million as part of a Series C funding round, smashing the previous record for a bitcoin company. Less than one year after the collapse of Mt. Gox, United Kingdom-based exchange Bitstamp announced that their exchange would be taken offline while they investigate a hack which resulted in about 19,000 bitcoins (equivalent to roughly US$5 million at that time) being stolen from their hot wallet. The exchange remained offline for several days amid speculation that customers had lost their funds. Bitstamp resumed trading on 9 January after increasing security measures and assuring customers that their account balances would not be impacted.Pros of Using a P2P Exchange:accept bitcoin tether обзор спекуляция bitcoin bitcoin paw pro bitcoin ethereum pools monero rur обналичить bitcoin bitcoin venezuela zcash bitcoin testnet ethereum rpg bitcoin bittorrent bitcoin bitcoin red
bitcoin кран bitcoin background life bitcoin bitcoin kaufen bitcoin mixer bitcoin trading addnode bitcoin bitcoin биткоин best bitcoin bitcoin grafik siiz bitcoin блок bitcoin pool bitcoin coindesk bitcoin ethereum обменники ethereum ubuntu хардфорк bitcoin ethereum code tether bootstrap bitcoin fortune купить tether bitcoin кошелек mindgate bitcoin bitcoin auto bitcoin me протокол bitcoin monero калькулятор bitcoin half bitcoin протокол make bitcoin bitcoin софт bitcoin markets metropolis ethereum golden bitcoin bitcoin картинки bitcoin символ bitcoin china проекта ethereum
bitcoin python bitcoin usd зарабатывать bitcoin ethereum api nem cryptocurrency bitcoin etherium asics bitcoin bitcoin блок понятие bitcoin purchase bitcoin форки bitcoin bitcoin moneypolo bitcoin комментарии сложность monero buying bitcoin создать bitcoin bitcoin motherboard bitcoin значок
ethereum биткоин bitcoin masters продам ethereum ethereum forks bitcoin lottery What is the best Coinbase alternative? What sites are like Coinbase? Read the complete alternatives to Coinbase guide to find out.In 2012, the Cryptocurrency Legal Advocacy Group (CLAG) stressed the importance for taxpayers to determine whether taxes are due on a bitcoin-related transaction based on whether one has experienced a 'realization event': when a taxpayer has provided a service in exchange for bitcoins, a realization event has probably occurred and any gain or loss would likely be calculated using fair market values for the service provided.'особенности ethereum bitcoin telegram
bitcoin переводчик difficulty monero bitcoin options bitcoin официальный развод bitcoin buy bitcoin
bitcoin signals box bitcoin bitcoin nedir bitcoin вконтакте cryptocurrency faucet mail bitcoin bitcoin donate bitcoin kurs ethereum получить conference bitcoin bitcoin софт Simplifying Business to Businessbitcoin news fake bitcoin алгоритм ethereum Now, if you want to read your emails or send an email, you need to enter your email password. This is how private keys work. Private keys are like passwords for cryptocurrency. Public keys can be seen by anyone, but private keys should only be seen by you. If there is one paramount detail you should learn from this What is Cryptocurrency guide, it’s that keeping your private keys safe is extremely important!ubuntu ethereum ethereum core bitcoin tools bitcoin автоматический total cryptocurrency ethereum картинки water bitcoin bitcoin funding avto bitcoin accepts bitcoin ethereum видеокарты msigna bitcoin yandex bitcoin bitcoin 2017 usb tether fork ethereum обвал ethereum bitcoin клиент
Easy to set upHas management considered the technology and security concerns for cryptocurrencies?These days virtually all the methods available to buy bitcoin also offer the option to sell.bitcoin ads bitcoin автоматически cryptocurrency analytics bitcoin создатель
json bitcoin apk tether bitcoin форки bitcoin бизнес
avalon bitcoin настройка bitcoin bitcoin neteller 2x bitcoin
алгоритм monero
bitcoin traffic ethereum programming bitcoin mmm bitcoin banking ethereum forum график bitcoin bitcoin приват24 криптовалюту monero фри bitcoin bitcoin открыть crococoin bitcoin casper ethereum ethereum видеокарты bitcoin сети options bitcoin android tether bitcoin 99 карты bitcoin
bitcoin автосерфинг смесители bitcoin bear bitcoin bitcoin monero tether майнинг
bitcoin check
bitcoin spinner перспективы ethereum bitcoin кэш bitcoin бесплатные node bitcoin Bitcoin cloud mining enables people to earn Bitcoins without bitcoin mining hardware, bitcoin mining software, electricity, bandwidth or other offline issues.bloomberg bitcoin
зебра bitcoin фри bitcoin генераторы bitcoin карты bitcoin контракты ethereum
fake bitcoin tether скачать bitcoin flapper аккаунт bitcoin ethereum биржа doubler bitcoin bitcoin usd
avto bitcoin bitcoin ledger
polkadot cadaver разработчик bitcoin криптовалюта tether ethereum faucet bitcoin compromised продать ethereum sportsbook bitcoin ethereum прогноз доходность ethereum bitcoin котировка tether usd bitcoin алгоритм store bitcoin tether gps bitcoin poloniex
bitcoin maps bitcoin daemon bcc bitcoin Ryan CordellThe question then becomes whether that energy associated with Bitcoin is put to good use. Does Bitcoin justify its energy usage? Does it add enough value?bitcoin betting Super secureAs the pace of tech node improvement slows down, ASIC performance becomes increasingly dependent on the company’s architectural design skills. Having an experienced team to implement fully-custom chip design is therefore critical for ASIC manufacturers to succeed in the future. In the long term, ASIC design will become more open-source and accessible, leading to commoditization.майнер bitcoin algorithm bitcoin bitcoin доллар bitcoin сайт bitcoin login bitcoin код нода ethereum apple bitcoin bitcoin книга msigna bitcoin bitcoin neteller
ethereum info bitcoin обвал He elaborated in a subsequent book: 'Businessmen will be constantly experimenting, controlling more or less, creating a moving equilibrium' between full-time and temporary contract labor. These impacts are also consistent with the stated goals of Satoshi Nakamoto and the Cypherpunks, whose resistance to institutional authority is rooted in a resentment for the managerial class and for the laws that protect and incentivize proprietary software.bitcoin сбор