How to Dictator Proof Your Money?
Cash is king, even if you are an activist
leading a democratic movement
against some of the world's worst dictators.
That's why Bitcoin has quickly become the currency of choice
for dissidents working everywhere.
By Alex Gladstein, human rights activists around the world
have a new tool, unstoppable electronic cash.
From Russia to Cuba to Nigeria,
advocacy groups and nonprofit organizations
are increasingly adopting Bitcoin,
an open source, decentralized,
censorship resistant digital currency
to help keep their donations coming
and their payrolls flowing
even when authoritarian regimes and state forces
shut down their bank accounts.
In almost every dictatorship,
the financial system is weaponized.
Whether it be Erdogan in Turkey,
the military regime in Zimbabwe,
the Nasimbi, family in Togo,
the Maduro junta in Venezuela, or Putin in Russia,
a first choice tool of autocrats
when dealing with dissidents or political opponents
is financial deplatforming.
Protests are expensive.
And if organizers can no longer receive donations
or pay community members,
democratic momentum can fizzle out.
Within this context,
Bitcoins rise as a dissonant currency of choice
starts to make sense.
Bitcoins spread as a currency of choice for activists
accounts for a small portion of its global appeal
as money for people living in anti-democratic countries
with access to nothing more than weak currencies.
As of today, only about 1.2 billion people
enjoy the benefit of a liberal democracy
that protects property rights and free speech
and a native reserve currency such as the dollar,
Euro or Yen, everyone else,
meaning more than 80% of humanity,
lives either under tyranny or a weak currency
that is prone to devaluation and hard to use abroad.
In Gaza today, one of the only ways to get money
into the besieged territory is with Bitcoin.
In Cuba, a good way to short circuit
the Communist Party's predatory dual currency system
is to send Bitcoin to family and friends,
which they can freely trade for goods, services
or Cuba's digital currency.
In Ukraine, in the days after Vladimir Putin's invasion
in 2022, the banking system went down,
but Bitcoin kept working and groups
like the Open Dialogue Foundation
were able to save lives by using it to get equipment
and aid where it needed to go.
In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi
has recently frozen the bank accounts
of the country's main opposition party
and has frequently targeted the accounts
of environmental groups, labor organizers and abolitionists,
but Bitcoin is beyond his grasp.
In Venezuela, where hyperinflation destroyed
a once proud and productive country
and created the world's largest humanitarian crisis,
Bitcoin played a key role in helping people escape
with their wealth intact.
Many like Mauricio de Bartolomeo,
who now runs a successful payments company in Canada,
were able to migrate with their wealth intact
and accessible via a seed phrase of 12 words
that could be written down, sent abroad or memorized.
In Afghanistan, the humanitarian Roya Mabub
started paying her female employees in Bitcoin in 2013
as male relatives would seize cash
and other digital payment forms were sanctioned
or not available.
Bitcoin, she said, gave the girls and women
that she worked with freedom and sovereignty.
Since the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021,
Bitcoin remains a critical way for her to get money
into Afghanistan to fund underground education
for girls who have been out of school
for more than two years.
Dollars simply don't work for this purpose,
but Bitcoin does with the teachers on the receiving end
able to walk into town and swap the digital currency
for cash at Huala Brokers.
Bitcoin was invented in 2009
and only really began to find widespread global use
after its price bubble in 2017.
For many years, it didn't make a lot of sense
as an activist currency,
simply because it was something few people would accept.
But that has changed dramatically today
in nearly every place on earth.
There is someone happy to buy Bitcoin
in exchange for local currency,
whether on Telegram, in person, on WhatsApp,
or on some kind of exchange,
making it an ideal technology for getting value
to some of the toughest places in the world
where the banking system can no longer safely
meet activists' needs.
In Hong Kong, activists send Bitcoin to colleagues
inside the now occupied city,
who withdraw at ATMs without needing to show ID,
keeping out of the Chinese Communist Party's watchful eye.
In Belarus, democracy protesters keep their marches going
and journalists keep their stories flowing with Bitcoin.
In Zimbabwe, the military regime
is trying to impose a new currency,
causing chaos in exchange markets,
but Satoshi Nakamoto's invention keeps working,
processing new transactions every 10 minutes
without government interference.
Perhaps the most surprising case was revealed
at the 2022 Bitcoin conference in Miami
by North Korean human rights advocate, Ye-On Mi Park.
She explained to the audience that most people
who escape from North Korea are vulnerable women
who are often sex trafficked or enslaved without ID
and without even speaking the local language.
Christian missionaries are one of the only groups
working to free them.
She explained that it was hard to send dollars
to help the pastors on the ground
in Northeastern China do this work,
but with Bitcoin, it was much easier.
If Bitcoin can work on the North Korean border,
or in Gaza, or in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
then it can work just about anywhere.
Some of these early adopters are gathering
on the University of Virginia campus this weekend.
As the Serbian-based Center for Applied Nonviolent Action
and Strategies, CANVAS, hosts its fifth People Power Academy,
an event focusing on equipping the leaders
of global democratic movements with better tactics
and tools for revolutionary change.
CANVAS itself, founded by Serge Popovic,
has recently incorporated Bitcoin education
into its global programs.
The Freedom Academy, a project of the World Liberty Congress
founded by Gary Kasparov, Masi Al-Injad,
and Leopoldo Lopez, is in its second year
of Bitcoin education, having hosted trainings and events
to help its community members in Africa, Europe,
and Latin America use this new tool
to overcome authoritarian controls and surveillance.
They will be in attendance, as will Anna Chekowicz,
the financial director of the Alexi Navalny-founded
Anti-Corruption Foundation, which started using Bitcoin in 2016
as a reaction to the increasingly sensorious
and confiscatory Putin regime.
Also present will be Felix Maradiaga,
a Nicaraguan civil society leader who recently spoke
at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
about the Ortega regime's strategy
of freezing the bank accounts of anyone it doesn't like,
ranging from activists to the Catholic Church.
The Human Rights Foundation, HRF,
where I serve as chief strategy officer,
has run Bitcoin and human rights programming since 2017.
Each year, we add more, as we see governments
around the world step up their attempts
to fluster dissidents and opposition groups
by cutting off their funding.
HRF focuses on authoritarian regimes,
where this behavior is unfortunately commonplace.
But the world arguably saw the first major practical use
of Bitcoin in 2011, when Julian Assange posted
a Bitcoin address on the WikiLeaks Twitter page
in response US-led banking blockade
of the whistleblower organization.
Two years later, HRF was contacted by activists
on the front lines of protests
against the Viktor Yanukovych regime in Ukraine.
They asked us and our chairman, Gary Kasparov,
if we could help them with a Bitcoin fundraiser.
Their bank accounts were closed or shut off
from the outside world.
As they titled their Reddit post about the fundraiser,
quote, only Bitcoin can reach them.
To our surprise, the campaign was a success
and the protesters received the much needed aid,
despite the government's efforts to keep them isolated.
Over the years, we kept seeing cases like this pop up,
eventually prompting us to run regular programming,
connecting Bitcoin developers and entrepreneurs
with dissident leaders in authoritarian countries.
In 2020, we launched the Bitcoin Development Fund
to make grants to related open source software
and educational projects in authoritarian regimes.
Since then, we have made more than 100 grants
across more than 40 countries,
deploying more than 4 million US dollars.
To be clear, there are many challenges with using Bitcoin.
The currency remains volatile day to day,
prompting some activists to supplement Bitcoin use
with stable coins, such as Tether,
that are pegged to the US dollar,
but come with the downside
of being centralized and freezable.
Bitcoin transaction fees can be high,
currently around $5 to $10 at the time of writing.
So more and more Bitcoin apps
are adding technology called the Lightning Network
that can send Bitcoin transactions for pennies.
Of course, true bad guys can also use Bitcoin,
just as they can use encrypted messaging apps such as Signal,
as it cannot discriminate and is money for anyone.
The biggest obstacle remains education.
Most activists still haven't heard
about Bitcoin being a human rights tool,
and it remains difficult for newcomers
to sort through the vast sea of scams
and Ponzi schemes in the cryptocurrency space
to focus on Bitcoin.
Given enough time, however,
anyone can learn how to overcome these obstacles.
If you are running a human rights group
and your bank account hasn't yet been frozen,
flagged, or compromised,
it likely will sooner rather than later.
The human rights defenders gathered
at the People Power Academy in Charlottesville know that.
The good news is there's a tool they can use
to keep their work going,
even if dictators want them to stop.