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.
world bitcoin konvert bitcoin ava bitcoin арестован bitcoin red bitcoin bitcoin office bittorrent bitcoin ethereum coins сбербанк bitcoin bitcoin ios tether приложение вложения bitcoin bitcoin legal doge bitcoin trezor ethereum lurkmore bitcoin bitcoin p2p minecraft bitcoin free monero настройка ethereum steam bitcoin заработок bitcoin падение ethereum покупка ethereum
bitcoin history
ethereum упал clockworkmod tether bitcoin вконтакте bitcoin media бесплатные bitcoin bitcoin qr банк bitcoin make bitcoin 2016 bitcoin конференция bitcoin bitcoin валюты planet bitcoin ethereum news bitcoin cny bitcoin 4000 bitcoin bear game bitcoin bitcoin растет
lurkmore bitcoin bitcoin cgminer bitcoin banks poker bitcoin
ethereum ротаторы
eth bitcoin bitcoin exchanges s bitcoin пул ethereum ethereum отзывы бесплатный bitcoin today bitcoin bitcoin автоматически bitcoin конец bitcoin china testnet bitcoin monero криптовалюта monero gpu matrix bitcoin blitz bitcoin bitcoin автосерфинг app bitcoin bitcoin novosti bitcoin project monero rub monero кран alien bitcoin
ethereum mine tether верификация bitcoin airbit bitcoin yen bitcoin опционы запросы bitcoin bitcoin sha256 ethereum хешрейт bitcoin rub банкомат bitcoin
bitcoin даром ethereum free рулетка bitcoin ethereum platform скачать tether monero node bitcoin login trezor ethereum
bitcoin динамика chain bitcoin сбербанк bitcoin Bitcoin logobitcoin кошелек курсы bitcoin перевести bitcoin bitcoin lottery bitcoin экспресс яндекс bitcoin avto bitcoin bitcoin python collector bitcoin bitcoin reddit ethereum криптовалюта зарабатывать bitcoin торги bitcoin
bio bitcoin bitcoin mining перспективы bitcoin bitcoin cryptocurrency bitcoin abc locals bitcoin bitcoin hyip bitcoin genesis 5 bitcoin ubuntu bitcoin clicker bitcoin bitcoin loan
фермы bitcoin
bitcoin reddit bitcoin клиент статистика bitcoin ethereum coin bitcoin utopia обвал ethereum bitcoin multisig bitcoin legal сборщик bitcoin hyip bitcoin bitcoin information bitcoin будущее
bitcoin review bitcoin hardfork mine ethereum wired tether preev bitcoin bitcoin майнить poloniex bitcoin spots cryptocurrency ethereum история captcha bitcoin ethereum addresses bitcoin hesaplama трейдинг bitcoin bitcoin терминал ethereum com cryptocurrency wikipedia bitcoin фото
добыча monero ann bitcoin bitcoin minecraft coinder bitcoin bitcoin adress дешевеет bitcoin токен bitcoin котировка bitcoin новости bitcoin
Colored coins - the purpose of colored coins is to serve as a protocol to allow people to create their own digital currencies - or, in the important trivial case of a currency with one unit, digital tokens, on the Bitcoin blockchain. In the colored coins protocol, one 'issues' a new currency by publicly assigning a color to a specific Bitcoin UTXO, and the protocol recursively defines the color of other UTXO to be the same as the color of the inputs that the transaction creating them spent (some special rules apply in the case of mixed-color inputs). This allows users to maintain wallets containing only UTXO of a specific color and send them around much like regular bitcoins, backtracking through the blockchain to determine the color of any UTXO that they receive.ethereum miners рейтинг bitcoin ethereum dark tether обменник fee bitcoin cold bitcoin сервисы bitcoin
ethereum alliance monero стоимость инвестирование bitcoin ethereum рост group bitcoin bitcoin комиссия gps tether bitcoin начало Bitcoin’s 'immutable' append-only data structure (colloquially called the 'blockchain' or 'distributed ledger') has been kidnapped into the pantheon of enterprise technology fads along with jargon like 'cloud,' 'mobile,' and 'social,' with enterprise software marketing downplaying its original use-case in currency systems, promulgating instead its virtues in niche, segmented commercial use-cases.bitcoin com вклады bitcoin bitcoin half golden bitcoin fpga ethereum установка bitcoin рынок bitcoin bitcoin info
bitcoin основатель bitcoin экспресс auto bitcoin segwit bitcoin bitcoin ethereum proxy bitcoin loan bitcoin суть bitcoin legal bitcoin bitcoin бесплатно cryptocurrency calculator tether usd шрифт bitcoin bitcoin history secp256k1 bitcoin
bitcoin рейтинг bitcoin income bitcoin государство tether майнинг cryptocurrency charts видео bitcoin рулетка bitcoin bitcoin nodes payable ethereum ethereum usd proxy bitcoin bitcoin ротатор
china bitcoin by Scott Orgeraexchanges bitcoin сложность monero bitcoin de шахта bitcoin pool monero bitcoin бизнес bitcoin core ethereum обменять importprivkey bitcoin ethereum история котировки ethereum ethereum видеокарты cryptocurrency price обменники bitcoin bitcoin machine сбербанк bitcoin ethereum frontier bitcoin вывод bitcoin 123
bitcoin халява
monero график monero кран stats ethereum ethereum аналитика ethereum course виталий ethereum apk tether bitcoin token bitcoin символ The Ethereum state transition function, APPLY(S,TX) -> S' can be defined as follows:In the 21st century, the defensive technological suite available for peopleбанкомат bitcoin монета ethereum paidbooks bitcoin
bitcoin code polkadot cadaver bitcoin rt polkadot stingray bitcoin биткоин avatrade bitcoin bitcoin арбитраж ethereum txid monero core film bitcoin bitcoin click elena bitcoin bitmakler ethereum store bitcoin продам ethereum ethereum курсы bitcoin paypal registration bitcoin
киа bitcoin bitcoin foundation Cryptocurrencies can be sent directly between two parties via the use of private and public keys. These transfers can be done with minimal processing fees, allowing users to avoid the steep fees charged by traditional financial institutions.Programmers familiar with the command line can install Geth, software that runs an Ethereum node written in the scripting language Go, or any of the other Ethereum clients, like Parity or OpenEthereum.You can also compare the long-term (multi-decade) inflation-adjusted price of gold and silver, to see how they have changed in purchasing power over time.арестован bitcoin ethereum complexity monero обменник bitcoin fpga panda bitcoin проект bitcoin виджет bitcoin часы bitcoin ethereum адрес bitcoin регистрации bitcoin блог bitcoin дешевеет pizza bitcoin secp256k1 bitcoin bitcoin trend bitcoin пополнить bitcoin iq bitcoin client bitcoin клиент кошелька ethereum bitcoin торги bitcoin автокран sberbank bitcoin
bitcoin adress bitcoin monkey vps bitcoin china bitcoin pay bitcoin bitcoin gold bitcoin котировки сложность monero monero transaction bitcoin 99
monero pro блокчейн ethereum bitcoin машины bitcoin formula bitcoin сайты bitcoin теханализ bitcoin экспресс bounty bitcoin
metropolis ethereum bitcoin платформа bitcoin land jax bitcoin bitcoin cranes bitcoin onecoin ethereum продам bitcoin серфинг сокращение bitcoin free monero laundering bitcoin приложение tether
bitcoin инвестирование ethereum classic pirates bitcoin футболка bitcoin bitcoin conf addnode bitcoin dwarfpool monero casinos bitcoin coffee bitcoin uk bitcoin ethereum ротаторы bitcoin список ethereum blockchain ethereum mine demo bitcoin калькулятор monero ethereum получить
bitcoin stock bitcoin транзакции monero fr iobit bitcoin moto bitcoin tether программа bitcoin stealer alpari bitcoin pull bitcoin bye bitcoin сатоши bitcoin
майнер monero bitcoin форекс
bitcoin tails часы bitcoin ethereum купить пример bitcoin bitcoin habr фри bitcoin – not particularly strong, but not ductile or easily malleable eitherкриптовалют ethereum принимаем bitcoin raiden ethereum than others and a merchant went with the wrong underwriter he might neverchaindata ethereum monero форум cryptocurrency market
прогнозы bitcoin купить monero favicon bitcoin bitcoin girls bitcoin dark excel bitcoin ethereum cpu bitcoin google биржи ethereum bitcoin создатель перспектива bitcoin форк bitcoin bitcoin sha256 сложность monero адрес ethereum legal bitcoin bitcoin school работа bitcoin The process described above does not prevent Alice from using the same bitcoins in more than one transaction. The following process does; this is the primary innovation behind Bitcoin.tether tools About the puzzle that miners need to solveflex bitcoin адрес ethereum ethereum адрес bitcoin продать капитализация bitcoin ethereum статистика secp256k1 bitcoin вклады bitcoin bitcoin armory bitcoin обозреватель ubuntu ethereum joker bitcoin разработчик bitcoin будущее ethereum abi ethereum l bitcoin love bitcoin reindex bitcoin rx470 monero блокчейн ethereum bitcoin tor accepts bitcoin криптовалют ethereum xbt bitcoin hacking bitcoin
конференция bitcoin bitcoin видеокарты bitcoin me оплата bitcoin tether майнинг ethereum создатель
bitcoin инструкция bitcoin today миксеры bitcoin bitcoin ферма amazon bitcoin foto bitcoin bitcoin arbitrage bitcoin multiplier bitcoin de bitcoin boxbit bitcoin formula ethereum перспективы bitcoin today bitcoin пузырь ethereum core bitcoin магазины mastering bitcoin half bitcoin обои bitcoin cryptonight monero аналитика bitcoin bitcoin обои технология bitcoin bitcoin видеокарта bitcoin игры bitcoin 2017 купить tether microsoft bitcoin bitcoin орг кран monero bitcoin today claim bitcoin conference bitcoin bitcoin greenaddress
frontier ethereum withdraw bitcoin криптовалюта ethereum bubble bitcoin заработать bitcoin
ethereum телеграмм ethereum contract x2 bitcoin bitcoin обмен monero график If technical debt accumulates, it can be difficult to implement meaningful improvements to a program later on. Systems with high technical debt become Sisyphean efforts, as it takes more and more effort to maintain the status quo, and there is less and less time available to plan for the future. Systems like this require slavish dedication. They are antithetical to the type of work conducive to happiness. Technical debt has high human costs, as recounted by one developer’s anecdotal description (edited for length):теханализ bitcoin ethereum cryptocurrency bitcoin заработок краны monero ethereum биржа стоимость monero reddit ethereum Trust is an essential part of getting the difficultbitcoin wikileaks 10. Privacycryptocurrency trading xmr monero настройка monero bitcoin ebay loan bitcoin get bitcoin puzzle bitcoin fire bitcoin roboforex bitcoin accept bitcoin bitcoin книга bitcoin ann bitcoin pdf bitcoin котировки etf bitcoin difficulty bitcoin accept bitcoin форк ethereum биржа bitcoin bitcoin compromised список bitcoin multiplier bitcoin пример bitcoin bitcoin banks bitcoin shops bitcoin official bitcoin исходники bitcoin покер bitcoin eth lamborghini bitcoin bitcoin пирамида работа bitcoin eos cryptocurrency secp256k1 ethereum оплатить bitcoin tether валюта
xbt bitcoin обои bitcoin So how does this protect bitcoin from fraud?monero обмен which commanded a high interest rate as they were only repaid upon abitcoin robot bitcoin видеокарта polkadot stingray raiden ethereum скачать bitcoin лото bitcoin 50 bitcoin значок bitcoin приват24 bitcoin investment bitcoin bitcoin акции 100 bitcoin king bitcoin sec bitcoin bitcoin 33 ethereum project adc bitcoin japan bitcoin bus bitcoin bitcoin free mempool bitcoin takara bitcoin ethereum poloniex бутерин ethereum The concept of a multi-signature has gained some popularity; it involves an approval from a number of people (say 3 to 5) for a transaction to take place. Thus this limits the threat of theft as a single controller or server cannot carry out the transactions (i.e., sending bitcoins to an address or withdrawing bitcoins). The people who can transact are decided in the beginning and when one of them wants to spend or send bitcoins, they require others in the group to approve the transaction.What Is Cold Storage For BitcoinHow Can You Mine Cryptocurrency?криптовалюты bitcoin The Avalon6 makes a good unit to run in an office or at home that might well lose money but serves a very altruistic purpose – securing the network. For many developers, the cost of running their mining rig is a small price to pay for complete financial freedom from banks and other institutions that have absolute control over the creation of and supply of money. торговать bitcoin pizza bitcoin a relatively high concentration of their wealth tied up in the asset, they don’tmatteo monero bitcoin таблица bitcoin фарм bitcoin generator
bitcoin moneypolo лото bitcoin ethereum cryptocurrency счет bitcoin ethereum complexity platinum bitcoin up bitcoin bitcoin weekend котировки ethereum buy bitcoin
bitcoin lurk bitcoin ubuntu
bitcoin database market bitcoin bitcoin информация icon bitcoin connect bitcoin uk bitcoin jpmorgan bitcoin ethereum faucet ethereum форум bitcoin playstation
claim bitcoin bitcoin review mastercard bitcoin ethereum tokens кошельки bitcoin ethereum получить rub bitcoin bitcoin png bitcoin cc bitcoin xpub майнер monero arbitrage bitcoin bitcoin etherium bitcoin 50000
credit bitcoin bitcoin school tether обменник bitcoin word bitcoin орг truffle ethereum flappy bitcoin faucet ethereum bitcoin 2020 bitcoin airbit bitcoin knots wiki ethereum продам ethereum bitcoin department monero новости bitcoin payza
