The Good Tech Companies - Educational Byte: Why Crypto is Used as a Tool for Freedom?

Episode Date: July 3, 2025

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/educational-byte-why-crypto-is-used-as-a-tool-for-freedom. In regions where people’s funds can be frozen without valid reasons or can vanish into inflation, crypto is offering a lifeline. Let's dig into why. Check more stories related to web3 at: https://hackernoon.com/c/web3. You can also check exclusive content about #crypto-for-good, #internet-freedom, #financial-freedom, #financial-censorship, #non-custodial-wallet, #cryptocurrency-adoption, #obyte, #good-company, and more. This story was written by: @obyte. Learn more about this writer by checking @obyte's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com. Crypto is more than digital money or a tool to get easy earnings. It’s a way to escape systems that often put up walls where you need bridges. Crypto is being used as a tool for freedom all over the world. In regions where people's funds can be frozen without valid reasons, or in which speaking out can get your bank account shut down, cryptocurrencies are offering a lifeline.

This audio is presented by Hacker Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. Educational Byte. Why crypto is used as a tool for freedom, by Obyte. When you think of crypto, you might picture wild price charts or stories of overnight millionaires. But that's just the surface. Beyond all the hype, cryptoire more than digital money are a tool to get easy earnings. It's a way to escape systems that often put up walls where you need bridges. Crypto is being used as a tool for freedom all over the world. In regions where people's funds can be frozen without valid reasons, can vanish into inflation, or in which speaking out can get your bank account shut down, cryptocurrencies

are offering a lifeline. They're not just cool tech. They're shields, passports, and sometimes even megaphones. Let's dig into why. Breaking free from traditional control. Do you know who prints and controls all traditional money, like USD or EUR, governments and their central banks? Therefore, they can order whatever they consider appropriate to be done with these coins. Print more, increasing inflation. Freeze the opposition's accounts, or the more mundane but still inconvenient event, asking you for a bunch of paperwork to open a simple bank account or to make a transfer. Now, here's the twist. Cryptocurrencies flip that model. With crypto, no single company

or government is holding the keys, only yourself. This doesn't always guarantee complete freedom. It always depends on the cryptocurrency network, their decentralization levels, and the tools you use, but it's certainly a help in most cases. In most cases, indeed, no one will bother to apply any kind of censorship, even if they could, because it's a very complex matter that probably only powerful governments could achieve and sometimes, depending on the decentralization level, not even them. Let's see a few real life cases. In different corners of the world, people facing injustice have also faced something sneakier, financial censorship. In 2010, Wikileaks had its donations cut off by major payment companies,

so supporters turned to crypto to keep it alive. payment companies, so supporters turned to crypto to keep it alive. Protesters in Hong Kong, 2019, and Belarus, 2020, saw their bank accounts frozen, too. In each case, cryptocurrencies stepped in as the only way people could keep helping one another. That was freedom tech in action. On the other hand, you'd do well to remember an old crypto adage, not your keys, not your coins? To really control your crypto, you, not your keys, not your coins? To really control your crypto, you need your private keys, secret words to access your

funds everywhere. If you're using a centralized exchange, think Binance or Coinbase, you don't actually own those keys, only an account there. It's like storing gold in someone else's vault. To be truly free, you'll need a non-custodial wallet, crypto platforms designed for freedom. It's also worth mentioning that not all crypto is created equal. Some crypto projects look decentralized on the surface but are controlled behind the scenes. If freedom is your goal, you want tools built to stay neutral and open, even

when things get tough. Ethereum, for example, faced a wave of censorship when the US sanctioned tornado cash. Some wallets stopped supporting it, and stablecoin issuers of Enfro's user funds linked to it. This happens because block production on Ethereum involves several layers, builders, relayers, and, validators. Each one has a chance to say, nope, to transactions they don't like. Something similar can happen on bitcoin. Miners can still cherry pick and reject transactions. So even if a transaction is valid, it might never make it into a block if enough middlemen get cold feet. This is where projects like obite come in. This crypto network runs on something called a DAG, short for directed

acyclic graph. Which sounds complex but just means it doesn't rely on miners or, validators. Unlike blockchains that bundle transactions into blocks and wait for approval by middlemen, obite spreads them out like a web in which you attach your own transactions to previous ones. No middle layer can reject them. Order providers help arrange things but can't block or censor anything. It's a model that puts users, not institutions, in charge. Exactly what crypto is meant to do. Featured vector image by Storyset, free pic Thank you for listening to this Hacker Noon story, read by Artificial Intelligence.

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