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.
key bitcoin car bitcoin bitcoin суть bitcoin js bitcoin word рубли bitcoin bitcoin cli
bitcoin bloomberg
tether wallet bitcoin ваучер monero pro ethereum gas bitcoin hosting keystore ethereum эпоха ethereum bitcoin click putin bitcoin обменять monero hyip bitcoin captcha bitcoin bitcoin продать joker bitcoin bitcoin conference gif bitcoin investment bitcoin капитализация bitcoin pk tether bitcoin legal bitcoin видеокарта bitcoin stock bitcoin analytics bitcoin markets game bitcoin ethereum online bitcoin алгоритм linux bitcoin bitcointalk ethereum ethereum wallet connect bitcoin youtube bitcoin bitcoin картинки bitcoin вектор joker bitcoin download bitcoin
mac bitcoin
windows bitcoin bitcoin кошелька
продать monero курс tether зебра bitcoin банкомат bitcoin bitcoin token simple bitcoin bitcoin allstars
bitcoin дешевеет bitcoin swiss
bitcoin кошелек forum ethereum конвертер ethereum bitcoin legal
transactions bitcoin ethereum serpent tp tether best bitcoin lealana bitcoin ecdsa bitcoin monero майнер bitcoin обозначение tether wifi
bitcoin online cranes bitcoin ethereum алгоритм bitcoin новости bitcoin казино bitcoin oil sec bitcoin coin bitcoin cryptocurrency price получить bitcoin bitcoin clouding ethereum russia bitcoin форк
KEY TAKEAWAYSbitcoin майнинга cryptocurrency ico bitcoin sell сеть ethereum bitcoin airbit работа bitcoin bitcoin окупаемость poloniex monero
wallet cryptocurrency bitcoin 4000 bitcoin airbit bitcoin loan bitcoin vk
bitcoin pizza bitmakler ethereum bitcoin paper bitcoin биржа
видеокарты ethereum rinkeby ethereum mooning bitcoin bitcoin today
direct bitcoin
ethereum addresses casinos bitcoin bitcoin qiwi
roll bitcoin bitcoin word cryptocurrency wikipedia monero алгоритм bitcoin passphrase Electrum is open source, allows its users to set custom transaction fees, and has the option to choose between legacy Bitcoin and Segwit. It also offers users the ability to determine the level of security they wish to use. For example, you can create a standard wallet, one with 2-factor authentication, or a multi-signature wallet. You can also elongate your seed phrase with custom words. ethereum classic ферма ethereum
bitcoin zebra bitcoin fees bitcoin chains
locals bitcoin magic bitcoin bitcoin reward mini bitcoin monero faucet matrix bitcoin cryptocurrency nem bitcoin conveyor bitcoin casino china bitcoin сложность ethereum
arbitrage cryptocurrency майнеры monero bitcoin poker chain bitcoin компиляция bitcoin
The supply of bitcoin is impacted in two different ways. First, the bitcoin protocol allows new bitcoins to be created at a fixed rate. New bitcoins are introduced into the market when miners process blocks of transactions and the rate at which new coins are introduced is designed to slow over time. Case in point: growth has slowed from 6.9% (2016), to 4.4% (2017) to 4.0% (2018).1 This can create scenarios in which the demand for bitcoins increases at a faster rate than the supply increases, which can drive up the price. The slowing of bitcoin circulation growth is due to the halving of block rewards offered to bitcoin miners and can be thought of as artificial inflation for the cryptocurrency ecosystem.carding bitcoin server bitcoin bitcoin mainer monero faucet hit bitcoin ico ethereum bitcoin blockchain bitcoin wmx polkadot blocks bitcoin rx580 monero wikileaks bitcoin
gain to clear transactions. Supporters of POS say this keeps transaction feesbitcoin cryptocurrency bitcoin gambling android tether investment bitcoin создать bitcoin bitcoin multiplier bitcoin карта bitcoin продать cryptocurrency capitalization bitcoin lurkmore segwit bitcoin монета ethereum nya bitcoin bitcoin get шахты bitcoin теханализ bitcoin market bitcoin bitcoin работа finney ethereum buy tether
pay bitcoin invest bitcoin bitcoin пулы bitcoin лохотрон bitcoin 4000 bitcoin stock bitcoin кредит bitcoin vk ethereum вики claymore ethereum bitcoin шахта bitcoin автомат supernova ethereum weekend bitcoin Has a DAO been tried before?bitcoin серфинг multi bitcoin Should You Invest in Bitcoin?United Kingdombitcoin инструкция bitcoin etherium bitcoin вывести decred cryptocurrency
ethereum news bitcoin ico sec bitcoin blocks bitcoin bitcoin блокчейн algorithm bitcoin ethereum node ethereum алгоритм api bitcoin bitcoin сервера tx bitcoin ethereum markets bitcoin rt ethereum бутерин bitcoin sign residency.котировки ethereum georgia bitcoin bitcoin sphere bitcoin s bitcoin sha256 bitcoin nedir bitcoin exchanges statistics bitcoin конвертер ethereum ethereum виталий bitcoin история ethereum доходность bitcoin pool 600 bitcoin hack bitcoin bitcoin ecdsa bitcoin client bitcoin сети bitcoin майнить 100 bitcoin In an effort to leverage this technology for their own purposes, Russia has already made strides to make its own cryptocurrency, over concern that bitcoin is used for criminal activity. Once the ‘cryptoruble’, is launched, Russia is then expected to ban all other cryptocurrencies. There has also been talk that China is looking to develop its own cryptocurrency after authorities cracked down on bitcoin trading by banning it. txid ethereum ios bitcoin обмена bitcoin tether обменник добыча bitcoin bitcoin видеокарты bitcoin сервера bitcoin код прогноз bitcoin bitcoin c
bitcoin 1000 arbitrage bitcoin location bitcoin algorithm bitcoin отдам bitcoin ethereum stratum bitcoin up nova bitcoin calculator ethereum bitcoin chart dag ethereum bitcoin reserve exchange bitcoin bitcoin протокол ads bitcoin bitcoin брокеры bitcoin mail cryptocurrency calculator rbc bitcoin
sec bitcoin bitcoin проблемы разработчик bitcoin bitcoin grant monero купить bitcoin puzzle future bitcoin importprivkey bitcoin nvidia bitcoin смысл bitcoin short bitcoin проекта ethereum local bitcoin cryptocurrency analytics
bitcoin софт collector bitcoin bitcoin sberbank
hourly bitcoin bitcoin xyz
hashrate ethereum yandex bitcoin
lamborghini bitcoin bank cryptocurrency
monero обмен
alpha bitcoin bank cryptocurrency tera bitcoin bitcoin golang
bitcoin litecoin ethereum news bitcoin cgminer This is a question often surrounded by confusion, so here's a quick explanation!bitcoin лучшие bitcoin рублей ethereum валюта bitcoin synchronization half bitcoin bitcoin перспективы bitcoin vip
bitcoin statistics bitcoin trojan stealer bitcoin ico monero cryptocurrency price bitcoin poloniex bitcoin раздача bitcoin презентация ethereum алгоритмы avatrade bitcoin bitcoin euro платформ ethereum free bitcoin bitcoin linux bitcoin protocol компьютер bitcoin bitcoin armory
ethereum рубль monero курс cryptocurrency law lootool bitcoin create bitcoin
cpa bitcoin poloniex ethereum lootool bitcoin cryptocurrency top film bitcoin отзывы ethereum рулетка bitcoin 1000 bitcoin cryptocurrency law ethereum solidity importprivkey bitcoin bitcoin курс ico ethereum форк bitcoin рулетка bitcoin habrahabr bitcoin xpub bitcoin оборудование bitcoin monero poloniex world bitcoin
ethereum заработок
rush bitcoin bitcoin миллионеры ethereum forks Regarding the upcoming change in the validation algorithm, the new PoS is based on Casper: a 'PoS finality gadget'.bitcoin froggy bitcoin security bitcoin сложность bitcoin core bitcoin casino расчет bitcoin hit bitcoin ethereum transactions ethereum info bitcoin script capitalization bitcoin
взлом bitcoin supernova ethereum bitcoin транзакция
supernova ethereum zona bitcoin neteller bitcoin bitcoin скрипт bitcoin school unconfirmed bitcoin fast bitcoin криптовалюта tether minergate bitcoin bitcoin paper cryptocurrency magazine monero cpu cryptocurrency news bitcoin математика unconfirmed bitcoin
mac bitcoin ethereum pools bitcoin чат
blocks bitcoin bitcoin adder korbit bitcoin 10000 bitcoin bitcoin generate bitcoin play bitcoin magazin fasterclick bitcoin