Unchained - Alex Gladstein of the Human Rights Foundation on the 3 Reasons Bitcoin Matters - Ep.125

Episode Date: June 25, 2019

In recent years, the Human Rights Foundation and Alex Gladstein, its chief strategy officer, have become forces in the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency community. In this episode, he discusses why Bitcoin is important for human rights, its three most important characteristics, and why Facebook's Libra project should be helpful to the adoption of the technology, at least in the short-term. He also describes how Bitcoin is just part of other movements that have become more open, such as governments shifting toward democracies and information becoming freer via the internet. He talks about how he thinks the technology can get wider adoption, why HRF supports the Open Money Initiative, and whether or not Bitcoin can help the North Korean people, rather than enriching its government, which has been the case so far.  Read the full show notes on Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2019/06/25/how-bitcoin-can-help-in-the-fight-for-human-rights/ Take the Unchained Podcast survey! Help make Unchained better! Take our survey and enter the giveaway for a free Bitcoin lightning node and a yearlong Casa Gold membership, — including a multisig security app for iPhone and Android, a Trezor hardware wallet, a Casa faraday bag, and 24/7 support! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/unchainedsurvey2019 Thank you to our sponsors! Kraken: https://www.kraken.com CipherTrace: http://ciphertrace.com/unchained Episode links: The Human Rights Foundation: https://hrf.org/ Alex Gladstein: https://twitter.com/gladstein Last year's Unconfirmed episode with Alex: https://unchainedpodcast.com/alex-gladstein-of-the-human-rights-foundation-on-the-first-crypto-war-ep-021/ This year's panel discussion on finances and freedom from the Oslo Freedom Forum: https://unchainedpodcast.com/oslo-freedom-forum-2019-protecting-financial-freedoms-in-the-digital-age/ Alex's essay for Time on why Bitcoin matters for freedom: https://time.com/5486673/bitcoin-venezuela-authoritarian/ Alex's response to Bitcoin critics: https://medium.com/@alexgladstein/a-human-rights-activists-response-to-bitcoin-critics-d50e6760ee80 The Open Money Initiative: https://www.openmoneyinitiative.org/ https://www.coindesk.com/whats-holding-back-bitcoin-in-venezuela-this-group-is-investigating How Bitcoin could help improve foreign aid: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/23/perspectives/bitcoin-foreign-aid/index.html Unchained episode with Bill Tai:  https://unchainedpodcast.com/maitai-globals-bill-tai-on-why-blockchain-is-the-6th-wave-of-technology/ Eric Wall's posts on Bitcoin privacy and wallets: https://medium.com/human-rights-foundation-hrf/privacy-and-cryptocurrency-part-i-how-private-is-bitcoin-e3a4071f8fff https://medium.com/human-rights-foundation-hrf/privacy-and-cryptocurrency-part-ii-bitcoin-wallets-2f68099b055f What Bitcoin Did episode with Mahsa Alimardani: https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/wbd-live-bitcoin-around-the-world-panel-at-the-oslo-freedom-forum Thae Yong Ho, the highest-ranking North Korean defector, at the Oslo Freedom Forum 2019: https://youtu.be/HmnBvsHl0qY?t=2662 Unchained episode with Jimmy Song: https://unchainedpodcast.com/jimmy-song-on-why-bitcoin-will-be-the-winning-cryptocurrency-ep-69/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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to comply with regulation and to monitor compliance. My guest today is Alex Gladstein, Chief Strategy Officer of the Human Rights Foundation, and a lecturer at Singularity University. Welcome, Alex. Thanks for having me, Laura. In a short time, you and the Human Rights Foundation have become visible forces and advocates for Bitcoin and decentralized technologies. But before we get to your work in the blockchain space, let's start with some background. What does the Human Rights Foundation do?

The Human Rights Foundation promotes civil and political liberties like free speech, freedom of and from religion, freedom of assembly, the right to participate in your government. And we promote these rights and we protect these rights in what we call closed societies or authoritarian. countries, countries that are ruled by some sort of repressive government, whether it's a dictatorship or a king or a tyrant or a military junta. And something that surprised me when I was researching this was that it was just founded in 2005? Incorporated in 2005 and we started operations in 2006, correct? And what have been the biggest campaign so far? Well, in many ways, Thor Halverson, our founder, started the Human Rights Foundation as a reaction

to what wasn't happening with regard to the world's worst human rights violations. So there were a lot of countries, and still are, unfortunately, ranging from North Korea to Eritrea to Uzbekistan, where they don't get a huge amount of media attention in certain aspects. And there's just not a lot of funding or support available to help people inside. And the Human Rights Foundation is in many ways kind of like acting as a voice for the voiceless and as a support network for people who live under these extremely repressive environments. And it's a lot more people than you might think. Roughly four billion people, billion with a B, live under an authoritarian government today.

And those are people that can't do some things that you might take for granted. For example, they can't write an op-ed in the newspaper. They can't sue their government. They have no real way to hold their government accountable. They can't start a nonprofit like an Amnesty International or like a Greenpeace. They can't really do effective environmental work. They can't do good effective whistleblowing work. They can't even really do good work when it comes to, you know, the areas of labor rights or even religion.

So there's a vast percentage, about 52% of humanity, whose rights and freedoms are really restricted in this way. And H.R.F. was founded because it's not just for moral reasons that we want to make sure that everybody has human rights. It's not just because it's the right thing. It also affects everything about humanity. So just to give your listeners some data, something like 96%. of all refugees come from authoritarian countries. Something like 18 of the top 20 poorest countries, the ones that are in the most abject poverty, 18 of those 20 countries are dictatorships.

23 of the top 25 countries with the worst access to drinking water are dictatorships. And if you look at things like patent rates, literacy rates, violence, death, homicides, all of these things are not just correlated, but causally linked with bad government. So we believe that no matter what you care about, whether it's peace or gender equality or religious tolerance or scientific innovation or having a good welfare state, no matter what you care about in your life and what you care about for humans, democracy and human rights matter. So since my podcast isn't really a political podcast and if my listeners are anything like me, their news intake is pretty high in crypto but somewhat low on everything else. else. I just want to quickly and briefly define some terms that I imagine you'll probably use fairly frequently throughout this episode. So first, just what are human rights? So human rights is an umbrella concept that can cover a lot of things. I'm using it primarily to describe

civil and political rights or civil and political liberties, which are similar to what's in the U.S. Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution, the U.N.'s international covenant on civil and political rights, which came to existence three, four decades ago. So these are things like, again, the right to protest, the right to participate in your government, the right to speak freely, the right to believe what you want to believe, the right to be free from torture and unjust punishment, the right to privacy, etc. This is traditionally what I mean when I say human rights. I'm talking about basically rights and liberties.

And then earlier when you were talking about authoritarian governments, so how would you define that and is the opposite always democracy or like what type of government you know are you sure the human rights foundation as a non-profit generally looks at governments and breaks them down into three types there are fully authoritarian governments where powers invested entirely in one person or one small group of people this would be for example in north korea in china in cuba and Saudi Arabia. Different formats, but the same general idea. Then they're competitive authoritarian countries. So this would be something like Hungary, for instance, which is a country where there's a political party that's eroding power from the opposition and kind of creating, like you're

seeing a dictatorship start to be born. What competitive authoritarian states do is rig elections. They stack their cronies on the judiciary. They start to kind of manipulate the legislature. They attack independent media. And a third type of government is what we would call liberal democracy more or less. So these are more or less free and open countries. There's no black and white. From Norway to North Korea is an enormous amount of shades of gray, right? But generally speaking, these are the three types of governments that we analyze.

And we focus our efforts on helping people who live under competitive authoritarian states and fully authoritarian states. And what are the problems in human rights that you think cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies could help resolve? Well, it's interesting because I think the human rights background for me and the time spent with people who live and who suffer under and who work under authoritarian governments actually gave me a respect for the revolution that Bitcoin started. When you think about the issue of control and what do governments control and how do they control people, a lot of it starts with money and economic. but you don't really think of it that way. So, for example, at most human rights conferences, currency and payments and economics are not on the agenda at all. But then again, what happens when a dictator wants to shut down a nonprofit?

What happens when Mr. Putin, for example, wants to close down an independent media outlet? One of the first things they do is shut down their bank account, right? When a government wants to sort of persecute a particular group of people, for example, they may make that group of people not able to purchase certain things, or they may sort of close them out of a certain part of the economy. When one government wants to hurt another government, they often engage in financial sanctions. There may be financial surveillance attached to certain technology

and certain authoritarian states. So when you start thinking about payments and about money and about how money works, you realize that they're intrinsically tied together. And a really, really great newsworthy example of this would be recently in Hong Kong, protesters knew that if they used their octopus cards, which is kind of like an oyster card or a metro card, a little card that they used to access the public transit system in Hong Kong, the students knew that if they used their student octopus cards, which were linked to their identity, to go to the protest, that the government would see that they had gone to the protest.

They didn't want that. They didn't want to be spied on. So there were massive lines of people waiting at the machines, which they normally don't do, to buy little cash to buy little cash top. pop-up cards. And I thought that was a really good example of how payments and money are linked to basic civil liberties and civil rights. Yeah. So let's now shift to your story. How did you first hear about Bitcoin? I think one of the first times I heard about it was in 2014 when I read Mark Anderson's New York Times article about Bitcoin, which I think still to this day is one of the best articles about Bitcoin. I also had some friends at the time.

who were organizing a fun little festival in central California in the Sacramento River Delta called the femurile. And that summer I went there and I happened to be on a houseboat with Brock Pierce. And Brock was certainly very excited about Bitcoin at the time. Still is. And he continues to be. And he was an evangelist for it. And he really put it on our radar at the time. It wasn't until a few years later, though, that I realized that there might be an intersection with the work that I did at the Human Rights Foundation.

there's an investor named Bill Tai, who I know you know well. He was, I think, the third guest on my podcast. Yeah, I mean, Bill's been in the space for a long, long time. He was at one of our events in 2016, and he said, well, why don't we try and work together? And at the time, and he still is on the board of Bitfury, the mining company. So Bit Fury, with Bill's help, was able to come out to the Oslo Freedom Forum in the spring of 2017 and start interacting with human rights activists. And we started having conversations about,

financial sovereignty and financial privacy and how decentralized money might help people who live under very repressive governments. And did learning about Bitcoin change your perspective on your human rights work? Yeah, it's interesting. I think it gave me a lot more hesitation and pause with regard to the status of freedom in democratic countries. I had always had a lot of respect for, and I still do, of course, for what democratic governments had achieved in terms of protecting certain types of civil liberties.

But the more you learn about the way money works and who controls it and how opaque it is and how elite it is and how closed of a system it is in terms of who gets to make the decisions about who prints money, who makes money, who monitors that, who decides when to change things like interest rates, even things like the Bank Secrecy Act in the United States, these aren't things that normal people think about all the time. And even in the human rights space, I hadn't really thought about. Learning about Bitcoin got me a lot more curious about how money is created. Who gets to decide when a payment goes through? And of course, I'd seen this a little bit with, and I know a lot of people saw the WikiLeaks example in 2010 as like something that allowed

this to come to the fore of the news for a little while was that major payment processors like Visa were blocking Julian Assange from receiving payments on instructions from the U.S. government, right? And I think that that's a good example of ultimately why something like Bitcoin is really important, because at the end of the day, it's a neutral payment platform. Nobody can decide that one person can't receive money or can't send it. And in an age of increasing surveillance, I think that's going to be increasingly important. So as I started to learn more about Bitcoin, I started to look more closely at my own surroundings. And even I'm an American citizen, I was pretty surprised. is that the level of financial surveillance that exists here, the amount of control over money

that the government exerts here, even in what I would call a free country. So it was really, really shocking and surprising. So that's one way that Bitcoin has kind of changed my opinion on the world. And how did you start incorporating your interest in Bitcoin into your work? Well, you know, we talk to human rights activists and civil liberties campaigners and civil society leaders from dozens and dozens of countries in very difficult political environments. And we talked to them about what they need. And a lot of them obviously need money. I mean, they need to fundraise. And receiving that money is often difficult. It's often something that can get delayed for long periods of time. It's often something that can get frozen.

It's often something they're worried that the bank is going to report to the government. So if you're in a country like Zimbabwe or Russia, it may even be illegal for you. It may even be illegal for you to receive payments from abroad, right? From like a do-gooder who wants to help you from abroad, a philanthropist or a foundation, right? So, you know, I'm hearing these complaints and these concerns, which are, of course, decades old for human rights activists. And I'm just sort of thinking to myself, well, you know, we can just send you, you, what if you could just learn how to receive money with Bitcoin? It's not that complicated. And, you know, 2015 is different from today in 2019. Today, in most of the countries that we're actually interested in, there's like massive

local liquidity, meaning there's an ability for you to turn Bitcoin, at least, into local currency, whether it's Nigerian, Naira, or Philippine pesos, or Chinese renmin or, you know, Venezuelan Bolivars, Iranian Riel, there is an ability within as little as a few minutes from when Bitcoin hits your wallet and is confirmed onto your wallet until when you can, you can be holding local currency in your hand. I mean, we've been, I've been interviewing people from different countries and through some of the countries I just mentioned, we're talking about 10, 15, 20 minutes to change Bitcoin into local currency, which makes it an extraordinarily effective way of moving, at least relatively small amounts of money from one place to another.

So you were just talking about Bitcoin, which I know you're a huge proponent of. Yes. But then, of course, there are the other technologies. this space. So, one are you layout for me sort of maybe all the things in crypto that you think could be helpful for fighting human rights and why? Yeah, I mean, I think I'll just also just break down the three things in Bitcoin that I think are important. And then we can talk about how other currencies may or may not have those things. So we have the deflationary aspect of Bitcoin and the fact that governments can't print more of it. This is very important. It gives

Bitcoin value. It gives Bitcoin something that's quite special. The censorship resists nature of Bitcoin is really important. The fact that the government can't stop a transaction, even if it doesn't like you, that's extremely important for human rights. And there's many aspects of Bitcoin, but the third one that I'll just kind of point out is the permissionless nature of Bitcoin as a financial tool, meaning you don't have to ask government's permission permission to receive a Bitcoin payment. You don't have to have an ID or a passport. So when we look at like the deflationary nature of Bitcoin, the censorship-resistant nature of Bitcoin, and the permissionless nature of Bitcoin. We have a pretty radical financial tool that I think is quite

revolutionary in the way that it changes the ability for people to transact with each other globally. Now, when it comes to other projects and other values, there are some extremely redeeming projects being done by people, especially in the area of privacy. Obviously, Bitcoin's pseudonymous, and there are some serious concerns about whether or not governments are using, well, we know that like European and American entities are using chain analysis procedures to track and try and, you know, observe and surveil people and actually prosecute them based on their Bitcoin activity. It's unclear how many governments are doing that, but it's clearly a large problem. And the Bitcoin technological community, you know, hasn't really, I don't think, risen

and completely to that challenge. There are some people inside the development communities that have made amazing tools that do make it possible for you at least not be the lowest-hanging fruit. practice good operational security. We've done some research on this that was sponsored by the Zcash Foundation actually into the privacy of cryptocurrencies. And Eric Wall, who's a privacy technology fellow at HRF, did two really good pieces on just how private is Bitcoin. I know. That first one was amazing. In both a software and the hardware point of view. And the answer is not too dissimilar from like encrypted communications. I mean, it really depends on how how good is your operational security.

And even if you have perfect operational security, you can still get compromised, right? So that's why projects like Zcash and Monaro are very important. Not only are they for, let's say, very technically savvy users, I think real options when it comes to needing to privately send money to each other, they are aspirational, meaning they inspire everyone else in the industry and community to make more privacy features. So I think that those are two projects that are quite important. And then we have, I think, the technology of the day, or at least of this week, which is Facebook's project, Libra, right? Which I will say, I think has probably a very large chance of having a really positive impact on humanity. A lot of the things that I find really amazing about Bitcoin are its ability to do these kind of like fast, borderless payments, right? Now, well, we should be clear in as much as Libra as a piece as a money, as a piece of technology, is not decentralized.

It's controlled by a bunch of validators. It's not censorship resistant. And ultimately, it at least won't be at the beginning permissionless. You're going to, according to the marketing materials I've seen, you're going to have to prove your identity to open a Calibri wallet to be able to own and control Libra, at least. at the beginning. They're promising a, you know, a transition to some sort of permissionless environment, which of course sounds exciting. But that's something that's difficult to do once you have a permission system. There are a lot of obstacles to that. They wrote it. They'll do it over five years or something? Yeah, so we'll have to see. I mean, look, I don't, you know,

the question is, do people trust Facebook on their promises? And I think that's a really fair question to ask. That's almost a euphemistic statement. I think it's quite fair to distrust Facebook. book on everything they say. But it's better that they say these things than not. And I think from what I've seen so far, it's only been a matter of hours, as we sit here, let's say, since the technical details of what Libra is supposed to be has been announced. But from people I respect who are very technical and who look into things quite deeply and are very skeptical of most projects have actually said that, like, this seems like this was very impressively thought out. And it seems like it could be positive for the world.

Again, this would be a type of cryptocurrency that's not permit. It doesn't have that permissionless feature that Bitcoin has. It doesn't have that censorship-resistant feature that Bitcoin has. And it certainly doesn't have the deflationary aspect that Bitcoin has. It's going to be a stable asset backed by fiat currencies, right? So it will probably track, of course, over time with things like the dollar and yen, which are inflationary. So what's interesting to me is that it has use and value, but it doesn't compete at all with the three things that make Bitcoin really special to me. So I think it's a very complementary technology.

Now, I've said a lot of positive things about Libra. I think the main suspicions that I have are around privacy and the collection of information and behavioral and payment data. I don't know exactly how this project's going to work. I do know that they want companies and entities. to pay a lot of money to be validators, right? And a lot of those people have already entered in those agreements. And you have to think of like,

why would you want to be a validator, right? Like, what is in it for you? And my fear is that over time, validators will collect data about how payments work in a way that might be intrusive into our lives and infringe upon our privacies.

I certainly don't trust Facebook with my own data. So I would ask you, I mean, do you trust them with your money? I think that there is a possibility, again, that this is like a positive force and something that will help break down barriers, hopefully, between different economies and possibly be quite a good thing for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as it introduces potentially hundreds of millions of people to the idea of money that's not provided by the state, right?

So that to me is interesting, but we have to be careful that we aren't building the the world's largest financial surveillance machine. I mean, we know what happens when the ability to kind of control money is mixed with a near limitless ability to surveil you. That's what's happening in China today with WeChat. This is an app that basically most urban Chinese people use for virtually everything, and it knows an enormous amount about you, and you use it for all your payments. And payments say more about you than your words, right?

So I think we need to be very skeptical about the privacy aspects of Libra. Thankfully, it doesn't exist yet. And we have time as I think like human rights activists, as concerned members of the cryptocurrency industry, as investors in Libra perhaps are listening to your show, to hold them as honest as possible with regard to how they're going to treat user data and how the system will work. to make sure that it's not, you know, basically a personal data-eating machine. I think from what I read and what I understand, there are ways in which Libra can be relatively privacy-protecting. They have pointed out that they would like to make this a pseudonymous currency, kind of like

Bitcoin, which is surprising and certainly positive to hear. But again, we need to be worried about what the validators are. gaining, you know, from running these validation nodes. And we need to be worried about how they can sort of chart payments and how they can potentially censor payments. So the world needs to be like very focused on that. And hopefully we can keep Facebook honest and we can keep the Libre Project, something that that is a net positive for humanity. So I mean, I'm sure you saw that they've been, they are working with these other non-profits. So could you see your, or the Human Rights Foundation working with them?

We already work with Facebook as sort of, I guess, the mother entity. And I think our strategy has been over the years, we also work with Twitter, who's an awesome partner and sponsor. I guess what I'm getting at is the Human Rights Foundation works with tech companies because our philosophy is we would rather have them involved in this work than not. Like I want these companies to be listening to the stories of human rights activists and to be understanding the challenges that people face in oppressive governments. So in the same way that the Facebook policy team may come to our events and be involved in our work, yes, we would love for the Libra policy team to also be there or the Libra engineers to also be there so they can understand some of the obstacles that people are facing around the world. It sounds like from the marketing materials that Libra is very much targeted towards disenfranchised people. And I think that they need to be in touch with initiatives like the Open Money Initiative and some of the other organizations that we work with at HRF. so that they can actually understand, like, what are the financial barriers that people face in these different countries and how can Libra be a force for good in these places?

I think, yes, that would be a really good dialogue to have. All right. So we're going to talk about the Open Money Initiative a little bit later, but I actually wanted to pick up on a couple of things. You said one was you just mentioned something about the relationship between money and state. How would you describe a healthy relationship between money and state? Well, this might sound radical, but I think in 100 years, people will look back in time. And think that it was kind of crazy that there was a total monopoly on money by governments, whether it was democracies or dictatorships. I think that a healthier relationship is probably something like where there's a separation of powers.

And I'll add some color to that. In the same way that political power we now think of, or at least I hope most to your listeners, think of tyranny or dictatorship as like a backwards idea, backwards concept. and that democracy rule by the people is a more fair and just system. And it provides checks on power, checks on arbitrary power, right? Then we have information, right? So I would also hope that your listeners would maybe consider that the open Internet where anyone can permissionlessly access information is a better system of information than what we had previously, which was sort of like ivory tower and government.

government-controlled information, right? So decentralizing political power and decentralizing information, I think have been really very progressive, positive forces for humanity. I want to make the same case for money. I think that money needs to be decentralized. I think that people need to be able to be more involved in the creation and distribution of money, and that technology like Bitcoin allows that. In the same way that technology like the printing press or the internet allowed for, the distribution and decentralization of information and that technology like democracy and voting, sort of decentralized political power away from tyranny. That's my sort of, I guess, radical idea. But I really believe that an open financial system will be just as healthy for the world as an open political system and as an open information system.

And when you were talking earlier about how the Human Rights Foundation does work with companies like Facebook and Twitter, in general, you have a huge technology focus, I feel like, at the foundation. That's just my perception, you know, from the Freedom Forum and just some other things. So why is that? My very first project at the Human Rights Foundation in the summer of 2007 was to put together materials to be sent to the Cuban underground library movement. So it was actually DVDs of, foreign films dubbed into Spanish that were things like V for Vendetta and Braveheart. And, you know, we did this because information is power, right? At the end of the day, the Cuban government, and this obviously, you know, 12, 13 years later has changed in as much as the Cuban people have a lot more access to the internet via this sort of paquete system where neighborhoods get information from the outside world on satellites and then distribute them amongst their communities.

But before that, you know, you basically only were able to understand what the government provided you, which was obviously a very brainwashed kind of very limited amount of information about how great the Cuban government was and how evil everybody else was. So by giving people books like Animal Farmer in 1984 in Spanish or by giving them access to foreign films that talked about, you know, the struggle for democracy. This was a very popular program, and it was something that made me realize how important, literally, information technology at least was going to be in the struggle for human rights. Later in my career, I worked a lot on our North Korea programs, so we've been sort of smuggling outside information into North Korea for a long time, and that was originally done through literally tying a bag to a balloon and floating it from South Korea over the DMC into North Korea, and then having a small acid timer go off. and the bag would open and DVDs and dollar bills and candy and flash drives would drop into North Korea as a just kind of an omen and a like a goodwill gesture from the outside world. More recently, we've tapped into the markets that are bustling every day on the border between China and North Korea and the North Korean refugees that we work was sent in information on flash drives through there.

So this further reinforced, at least my personal belief that information was going to be the key in many ways to human rights. Over the years, we also worked on information security. So, like, helping activists learn how to stay safe with their communications by using tools like signal and, I guess, trying to get a better understanding of how to stay safe online and how to be, you know, not the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to their communications. And I think now, you know, financial freedom and financial privacy and financial sovereignty are just as if not even more important than all of those things,

especially as we had deeper into the information age. I mean, to underline an example I gave you before today, in Hong Kong, people still have the chance to use paper money to top up public transportation cards and to buy SIM cards so that they can plug them into their phone and use telegram groups without disclosing their identity. They still have that option of using cash. They won't in five years or 10 years.

There won't be any paper money left. There's only 8% of the world's, Daily transactions today are paper or metal. 92%, and that's probably a conservative estimate of all the daily financial transactions in the world are digital. And that's only going to go towards zero as we head through the next decade. So we need private decentralized money. This is very, very important. Otherwise, you know, governments will be able to control their people and corporations will be able to, you know, control people as well.

So private and decentralized money, and I believe that. that ultimately these two things can come together in the form of Bitcoin and other projects will be a bulwark against authoritarianism and the surveillance state. I think that's kind of obvious at this point. We're going to discuss more about North Korea and the corporate surveillance state and the open money initiative and all kinds of things that we mentioned earlier. But first, a quick word from both me as well as our sponsors. The ScoreBet app here.

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lightning node, plus a free year of Kasa's gold membership, including a multi-sig security app for iPhone and Android, a Treasurer hardware wallet, a Kasa Faraday bag, and 24-7 support. Those of you interested in learning more about Kasa or about protecting your Bitcoin investment generally should check out my interview with CEO Jeremy Welch. Thank you to Kasa for donating. Again, the URL is surveymonkey.com slash R slash unchained survey 2019. Go there now. to give us your thoughts on the future direction of unchained and enter the giveaway. Back to my conversation with Alex Gladstein of the Human Rights Foundation. Of the economies that have so far been using Bitcoin for human rights purpose,

where do you think it's been having a noticeable impact or which countries usage kind of closely matches how you think Bitcoin could be used in its most useful or non-speculative form? Right. So I think at its current stage of its technology, from what I've seen, the most useful way to adopt Bitcoin and where we've actually seen people using it is as a cross-border payment basically, cross-porter payment mechanism as a bridge between two monies. So I'll give more detail to that. But essentially, in a place like Venezuela or Iran or the Philippines or

Nigeria or India or China, these are some of the countries that I've done interviews in Turkey, there are restrictions on what local citizens can do with regard to the world markets. They are cut off in some way. Again, that way might be because of their own government's financial controls. It might be because of U.S. sanctions. It might be because of capital controls. It might be because of lack of infrastructure. It might be because of high fees in the banking sector.

There are quite a number of reasons. But at the end of the day, you have billions of people who are disconnected from the financial world. And what we're observing through research is that some of these people are using Bitcoin as a way to access other money, meaning U.S. dollars, euros, et cetera. So you have someone that I was just with at the Oslo Freedom Forum who's of Iranian descent. And her partner, she was saying, you know, her partner's family, someone is very sick in Iran and her partner's family. They live in London. Bitcoin has been a way for them to send money to pay for cancer treatments in Iran.

Otherwise, it would be very difficult for them to send money from London to Tehran. This is not something that's easy to do, right? Yeah. Actually, just for listeners, I think Peter McCormack released that panel on what Bitcoin did, which she spoke about that there. Yeah, this is an internet researcher named Masa who's pursuing a doctor at Oxford at the moment. And she basically revealed in this conversation that was on Peter's show about how her family uses Bitcoin to send payments to Iran so that this person can pay for cancer treatment. That was, I thought, pretty powerful. A couple other stories would be that, you know, in countries like Philippines and Nigeria, and these are massive countries, 100 million person countries, right?

You know, tens of millions of people in each of these countries are non-resident workers. So I believe it's about 10 million in the Philippines and more in Nigeria. And these are people that live in countries outside of Nigeria and the Philippines where they don't have a bank account. So they're at the mercy of like third parties to get their money back to their family. And in the case of the Philippines, a lot of these folks work in South Korea. So they need to send Korean Juan somehow back to the Philippines where it needs to be received by their family in Pesos. Right.

So that traditionally has been a convoluted, delayed, slow process, where on average, according to Luis Bonaventura, who's an entrepreneur in this space, who was also on Peter's panel, this can be roughly about 7.5% is the fee you may pay end to end to end to get a $100 or a $200 remittance back from a place like Korea to the Philippines. So his company, Bloom, you know, started working in South Korea in I think 2014, 2015, and they were able to get that fee down to 3% using a Bitcoin-based solution. So that to me is indicative of the power that I think Bitcoin can have with regard to these cross-border payments that transcend governmental financial boundaries. Another good example would be, you know, to be more specific about Nigeria, Timmy, our friend Timmy, who runs buy coins, which is a Lego

based sort of cryptocurrency wallet exchange. Timmy's great. Love Timmy. But basically Timmy was explaining how some very, very clever Nigerians are using Bitcoin basically to make money in an arbitrage way on the way that different currencies float against each other. So they're not speculating in the traditional sense, meaning like buying some Bitcoin and trying to sell it when it's hot and trying to buy it when it's low.

They're actually using Bitcoin to acquire foreign currency. and try to make money in that way. So it was really interesting for him to talk about that. And again, like I think in places like this, whether it's, whether you're behind U.S. sanctions in Iran or whether you're behind governmental sanctions in a place like Venezuela or whether, you know, you're just not really tied into the world financial ecosystem, Bitcoin does provide you this like lifeline or this other opportunity to get access to the world economy. So that's like what I think we can observe and testify as currently, like, I guess, like the use case. Now, as Bitcoin hopefully becomes more usable and as there's wider like adoption of people who accept it, hopefully, as payment, let's say, then we can maybe start talking about it in the fight against financial surveillance. We're not really there yet because no one really will. It's not like, you know, the subway in New York City or in Hong Kong will accept Bitcoin for payments.

So we can't really talk about it as a way of protecting our daily financial habits until it adopts that in that certain way. But it certainly technically could be the answer for that. I think the answer there is more of like a socially and politically will it be feasible. But at the moment, the way that I've seen Bitcoin change the world and be a liberation tool for people is as this sort of way to, to neutrally and permissionlessly send money from one person to anyone else on the planet. And all you need is a smartphone and internet access. You don't need a bank account. You don't need a passport.

And that's very, very powerful. But so right now, obviously, this is happening on a very small scale. I think I actually heard you when I was researching this, that you said that, like, less than one person of the world's population has been exposed to Bitcoin, something like that. So what can you or HRF try to do? to make these technologies, you know, either more useful or more widespread or is that not your role? Like, how do you want to get to this vision that you're? Yeah.

Well, I think it's very similar to thinking about encrypted communications technology, something like a signal, right? In the case of let's take Bitcoin, for example, or even add all the other cryptocurrencies, right? I think best estimates are 40 to 60 million people by this point have interacted meaningfully with cryptocurrency. So again, that's less than 1% of the world's population. So you're right in that aspect in terms of it's small when you compare it to the whole world, but it's quite a few, it's quite a number of people who've been affected by it. I mean, we're talking millions of people who've had their lives changed in a meaningful way because of cryptocurrency, right? And in that aspect, I think it's probably similar to the path that encrypted messaging has taken,

where at first, encrypted messaging, generally speaking, was greeted by the wider, public with skepticism and certainly by hostility by the powers that be in terms of well what do you have to hide if you're using encrypted messaging right if you're a digital privacy advocate what are you hiding right so these were like arguments that we went through in the 90s in terms of you know what what could what possibly could you want if you're trying to encrypt something and send it to somebody it can only be bad right i think there's been a sea change in public attitude since then especially after the snowdon revelations about the idea that no we actually need to digital privacy in our communications.

Wait, but do you really think that there's been a C-Change? Absolutely. Because I feel like after the Snowden thing, like a lot of surveys showed that people actually didn't change their behaviors and they kind of said that they cared about privacy, but then they didn't really do anything about it. I mean, even with the delete Facebook thing, which happened last year, like a tiny, tiny fraction of people actually did. But let's actually break that down.

So what I'm saying is that there are, there is more public support. Now, whether or not I say I support privacy and I go home and download signal, that's a different conversation. I'm just saying there's been wider public support for the idea that people should have private communications. Right. But I'm saying, like, how do we get to those behaviors, which we are not there yet, let alone with Bitcoin. So in the same way that there's now wider public support after massive revelatory incidents like the Snowden, and like whether it's WikiLeaks, Snowden, et cetera, into the fact that like the ability to the whistleblow securely is important,

the ability to communicate like securely is important. These things lead to a change in public behavior. Now, the change in public behavior may not result in your friends using encrypted messaging, but it creates a different climate for companies. So after the Snowden case, one of the most successful things I can point to is that WhatsApp decided to add end-to-end encryption to its messenger. That's massive, right? They didn't have to do that.

They did that as a result of a change of public opinion, right? So oftentimes public opinion can drive companies who have vast numbers of users to do things differently and in the name of privacy and security for people. So that's been something we've seen happen. And I think we can hang our hat on that and hope to keep pushing in that direction. So in the same way, you're seeing Facebook today basically do something quite Brazen announced that not only are they creating a new currency that's not going to be just the US dollar, but that it potentially will be permissionless. Now, again, I had a lot of concerns

with the Libra project, but that's something that's unbelievable. And no one would have ever guessed that that could have happened five years ago. In the era of 2014 Bitcoin, if you had told somebody that in five years, Bitcoin, you know, Facebook was going to be announcing its own permissionless cryptocurrency. I think you would have probably been left out of the room. But it just happened today. So big tech companies have the potential to lay a lot of the groundwork for this. And in the same way that, like, I think a lot of people probably learned first about, oh, what is encryption? Because WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger turned it on, right? And they got a little notification about it. Tens of millions of people got a notification about it on that day.

I think now, through Facebook, a lot of people are going to learn what cryptocurrency is. And they're going to learn that money doesn't need to be provided by a government. Yeah. And it won't. It starts off permissioned. Yeah. I wonder. It won't be the solution, but I think it's a step in the right direction. I think we have to be philosophically flexible about it. Even in the Bitcoin space, think about how excited Bitcoiners are about the fact that, you know,

certainly quite a few Venezuelans have used Bitcoin, right, as a means of survival and commerce, et cetera. However, most Venezuelans, according to the Open Money Initiative, when they use something like local bitcoins to exchange, you know, their money into and out of bolivars, they don't own their own private keys. they're using local bitcoins as a digital escrow, right? So this is not philosophically what we want as bitcoiners, right? Quote unquote. I think bitcoiners, you know, want people to use their private key and have sovereignty over their money.

That's not happening in Venezuela, by and large. But it doesn't mean that it's not a good step in the right direction. So I think we need to retain a certain level of philosophical flexibility while still being skeptical. So I guess what I'm saying is like even if you don't trust WhatsApp, which was later than acquired by Facebook, or you don't trust Facebook with Messenger or you don't trust telegram or you don't trust now Facebook with Libra, it's really good to see these companies going in that direction. Look at Apple. I mean, Apple's trying to remake itself as a privacy company.

And I think we should be excited about that. We should be skeptical and we should hold their feet to the fire. But as someone who cares about user privacy, I'm really grateful that these companies are trying to please an audience that cares about privacy. that cares about permissionless finance, let's say, as opposed to the other model in the world, the Chinese model, where the dominant apps are so real-time censored that it seems like it's an episode out of black mirror, you know? So, so this, these are positive developments, I think. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. It's, yeah. It's one of those things where I feel like

there's, there is still that gap between what people say or, or, you know, and what they do. Because, like, even in Europe now when you go and you get all these pop-ups in every website, you know, being like, we're collecting information about you for our cookies. Right. Everybody just accepts or, you know what I mean? It's like there's no, I don't know. I just feel like, what are you going to do? Be like, okay, I'm not going to read this website now.

I'm not, you know. So in that regard, you know, I just feel. Well, I agree with you on that. I do think people trade their freedoms and privacy for convenience far too often. In fact, at the Oslo Freedom Forum this year, we had an exhibit. And it was, it showed people who maybe haven't used WeChat before how it works. And it was sort of a translation into English of the Chinese model of WeChat, let's say.

And it was like up above the interface was this mirrored image of the word evil and the word easy, right? Because it's so easy, but it's also evil, you know? So giving up all your privacy and freedom is convenient. Like it is something that people will want. So I think, you know, the answer for. like people who care about civil liberties and personal freedoms and personal data lies in the technology producers and the technologists making something that is convenient. That's key.

So WhatsApp Messenger is convenient. So them adopting what like in the end encryption is a good step in the right direction. I guarantee you that whatever this wallet that Libra is going to be used with, Colibra, this thing's going to be awesome in terms of its user design. I can guarantee it. It's going to be super easy to use and it's going to on ramp a whole bunch of people onto non-government provided money. And I think that that's really interesting. Yeah.

But that is the part that's offered by Facebook itself. Yeah. And again, I'm, you know, skeptical of the impact that projects like this will have on privacy. And I'm worried. But at the same time, I think we have to understand that things like this are going to on ramp more people onto the general concepts. And I think this is going to be great for Bitcoin, probably. I mean, I think it'll get more people interested. I mean, look, a lot of people are going to learn about cryptocurrency first about Libra.

They're going to first learn it through Libra. And then they're going to dig around on message boards and email and newsletters. And they're going to be like, what is this Bitcoin thing? And then they're going to learn about Bitcoin. And that's going to be like, you know, the red pill moment in the Matrix where they've heard about Libra. And then all of a sudden, wow, this is the real deal. You know, this thing is actually permissionless. This thing's actually decentralized.

This thing's actually censorship-resist. I'm not sure. People might just use Libra and might be like, oh, this is cool. This works. Here's the thing. The world is a lot bigger than New York or San Francisco, where you and I spend most of our time probably. Yes, Americans are pretty blasé about privacy, but the people I work with, they care about it. Oh, wow.

So if I can tell people in Zimbabwe or in Hong Kong or in places that are actually facing an actual either authoritarian government or authoritarian challenge, they will rise to the occasion. I mean, it's amazing to watch what Hong Kongers are doing today. They're going to, they're pulling out all the stops. They're wearing masks to confuse facial recognition and they're using cash to, you know, you know, quietly, you know, use public, you know, transportation services and quietly use social media coordination services. It's pretty amazing. So I do have this belief that people will rise to the occasion. They just won't do it where they're not pushed to do it. And in America and in Europe, We live in societies where we take our freedoms for granted, for sure.

Most people do. So I think the innovations will come elsewhere. That's why you're seeing Bitcoin be adopted in Lagos and in Caracas and in Tehran, where Masa at the Alza Freedom Forum was saying that, you know, if you get into a cab in Tehran today, people are going to be asking you about Bitcoin. Like adoptions happening in these places, not in Los Angeles or Sydney or Tokyo. And I think that that's all cohesive. Like I think that all makes sense.

these technologies will be adopted where they're where they're you know most needed yeah yeah no watching the Hong Kong thing has actually been somewhat emotional for me because I'm just like oh my gosh if I were to have grown up in a country that's like similar to the US and then suddenly have it become more in like China I would also be like them I would be like oh my god no like this is terrible um but anyway so I like we're running out of time and I have five million questions for you. And we keep talking about the open money initiative and we keep referencing Venezuela. So just talk a little bit about kind of like, you know, this initiative that you're backing and yeah, and what it is that you guys are seeing there and what you hope you can accomplish with the

open money initiative and what it is. The Human Rights Foundation has always had a founding focus on Venezuela. And in 2006 and seven and eight, it was tough because a lot of people thought Uco Chavez was a great guy. And, you know, they were like, well, he's a man of the people. Now, today, it's uncool to support populists. It's uncool to support authoritarians. But at the time, people loved Chavez. They thought he was like the best thing since sliced bread, generally speaking. I mean, I just remember when I first started at Araf, it was very difficult to have serious

conversations about. And I would say things like, well, you know, he's like stacking the Supreme Court and he's, he's taking radio stations off the air and he's taking the license away from TV stations and he's putting, you know, journalists and people just didn't want to hear it. They like really wanted to support him. And unfortunately, sadly, we were right to sound the alarm on Venezuela, and it has become the worst disaster in the Western Hemisphere. Four million Venezuelans have already left Venezuela, and as many as 8 million will have left by the end of next year. And the average Venezuelan has lost something like 25 pounds.

There is just starvation. There's absolute destruction in the form of hyperinflation, massive theft and corruption, environmental destruction, you name it. So this has all happened in the last decade, and it has happened increasingly since 2014 and 15. And we've always been an organization that's focused on helping civil liberties and political rights in Venezuela. We've always looked at assessing the health of the country in that area, and we've watched it deteriorate. Now, what was much more acute almost was the economic deterioration of Venezuela over the last five years. So when I met a group of very enterprising researchers and designers last summer who, wanted to to investigate, you know, how were Venezuelan IDPs or refugees living in Colombia,

you know, interacting with the world financially. I thought this was a fascinating project. So the Human Rights Foundation is very proud to support the Open Money Initiative and their efforts to understand, you know, how can the outside world be helpful in designing technology that Venezuelans can use that can benefit their lives. And I like that they're coming at this from an agnostic point of view from a platform perspective or a protocol perspective. They're not going there to push a particular project. They're going there with open hearts and open ears and open minds.

And they're like basically providing the world with a like a perspective on what do Venezuela needs. And what do Venezuelans need? And what do Venezuela needs? Dollars. U.S. dollars. I mean, Bitcoin is such a very distant second. You know what I mean? And they're even like different types of U.S. dollars.

There's dollars in Zelle and dollars in RTM. and then there's cash dollars and they all have their different prices, right? So we're learning about this kind of amazing, kind of tragic, but also kind of fascinating microeconomy that has grown in this area. And wait, and why would the value be different depending on what form it's in? So more people will accept different types of U.S. dollars as merchants inside Venezuela. So it's easier for you to spend, for example, you know, one type of apps dollars than another type of apps dollars.

Okay, so they have like a premium on the price. Some are more valuable, right? In the same way that, you know, digital bolivars are a different value than printed bolivars because you only need printed bolivars for certain things and they're harder to access, right? So it's fascinating to see this kind of like new, you know, again, tragic but kind of fascinating to see this new economy being born. And there's, you know, a lot of suffering and there's nothing you can take away from it. But sadness is the world does relatively nothing, you know, to help them as well. and refugees. Big institutions and groups like the World Bank and, you know, I think organizations that typically help refugees, you know, I don't know.

I just feel like they don't see Venezuelaans in the same light as they see maybe Somalis or Syrians or Afghanis yet. I mean, just even though it's the exact same human situation, there's something about it where they're not quite seen as refugees in the same way yet. I think that that shift will come. But in the meantime, I think getting companies to understand how they can play a role is useful in the open money. initiative is providing a window into how money works in Venezuela and what people can do. And, you know, hearing them talk, I mean, I know that, for example, you know, designing, you know, open source apps that run on older phones that would allow people to, like, for example, receive different kinds of digital assets, whether it's like Zell credits or Airtm credits or Bitcoin,

and then exchange them into BoliVars, building an app that would do all of that in one would be fantastic. So coming to an understanding of these things and then going back to the industry and saying, here's what people need, I think is a really, really valuable design research thing that the Open Money Initiative is doing and that HRF would love to support in other countries around the world too. So I want to switch the topic now to North Korea, which you know is personally very interesting to me because I'm of North Korean or Korean heritage, but partially North Korean. So far what we've been discussing is all the ways that Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, are good for evading, like, surveillance states or oppressive regimes. But that is actually also the aspect that makes it good for a country like North Korea to evade sanctions. And in

general, I just feel like that country, when we're talking about how Bitcoin can be used against authoritarian regimes, is the one like outlier simply because North Koreans don't have access to the internet, so they can't really use Bitcoin against the regime. So, is that just going to have to be the way that it's going to be? Because actually so far, what's going on there is that North Korea itself, the government is benefiting from Bitcoin. Yeah. You know, so how do you think Bitcoin can help that situation? Well, I think when it comes to North Korea, I think we have to look at how the government

sustains itself. And at the end of the day, it's about power and control and fear. Now, it is true that the North Korean government has figured out, he's very, very, clever is very smart. They've figured out that having a sophisticated cyber warfare capacity is very important, right? So putting money even aside for a second, they've been very successful in hacking public infrastructure in South Korea. Of course, we all know about the Sony hacks that, you know, ricocheted across America many Christmases ago. There's all kinds of sabotage attacks that they've done internationally that they've been quite effective in. Exactly. Now, when it comes to money, you know, yes, it definitely seems like from what we've observed that the North Queen

government has figured out if they rob cryptocurrency exchanges, that that can be an effective way for them to steal money that they need. But generally speaking, I think, from a bird's eye view, virtually all of the money that the North Queen government runs on is in the form of dollars and Rinambi and their own money. Bitcoin makes up a very small percentage. of the ability of the North Korean government to hold onto control. I think long term, Bitcoin as a decentralized form of money that will inevitably seep into North Korea in a way that the government cannot stop at the end of the day will only be a bad thing for the North Korean government. Wait, you mean to the people? Absolutely.

Satellite access already. So today, there is satellite coverage over North Korea. If you look at Blockstream, if you look at the map on their website. So if I had a small satellite device, I can send and receive Bitcoin transactions in the middle of North Korea without any internet, that's a start. Is that something that the Human Rights Foundation would try to do? That is something. I mean, how would they get liquid? I think anyone who's doing that probably wouldn't say that on a podcast.

What I will say is that there is liquidity, massive liquidity in China and at the Chinese border of Bitcoin. So Bitcoin is immediately valuable in Chinese border cities. So I'm just painting a hypothetical here, but if you have, if you, North Koreans are the most creative and entrepreneurial people in the world. They're the most bold and creative. They will do anything they can to survive. Wait, really? I feel like they've been totally brainwashed. Despite all odds.

How can they, how can they be creative? They were not trained to be creative. I know, exactly. But they are incredible. The ones that I've met, the people who've escaped, used so much not just bravery, but ingenuity, cleverness. I mean, these are people who don't have the tools we have. They don't have the freedoms we have. And they have to figure out anyway.

And I'm just saying that they figure it out. They've been so successful in just exploiting the tiniest little slivers of freedom to maximize the well-being for their family and their friends. And I wouldn't bet against them. Let's put it that way. No, I agree with you with the defectors that I met. I would never bet against a single one of them. I'm not talking about the government. I'm talking the people of North Korea are going to.

really like turn lemonade out of lemons. The point I'm saying is that over time, as more and more equipment gets into North Korea that can send and receive information over the internet, and as there already exists a way to send and receive Bitcoin in North Korea, and as things like open dimes, which is a way of physically trading Bitcoin like in physical cash, potentially popularize, and as cryptocurrency and Bitcoin continues to increase in popularity in China. It's only a matter of time before this stuff seeps into North Korea and starts eating away at the government's control over money. One of the more interesting things that I heard from a North Korean defector was from Teyang Ho, who you met at the Aaslo Freedom Forum.

It was amazing. Teangu is the highest-ranking diplomat to ever escape from North Korea. And I asked him a question because I had heard that in 2009, the North Korean government scrapped its currency and introduced a new currency completely, meaning people who had saved for decades in cash, that pile of money under their bed was all of a sudden useless. And I was so curious about this. And Ta-ung Ho, of course, was there in a very high-ranking official, so he knew all about this. It's never been reported in the English media, but I wanted to learn from him about what

exactly happened. And, you know, he was basically saying that the economic minister of unity or whatever they called him, after this happened, the plan didn't work as predicted. Basically, people were so despondent over this that they just didn't go to the markets for like a day or two. That's about as much protest as they could muster. They just didn't go to sell their wares because they were so depressed about what had happened to their savings. And because of this was like a period of depressed economic activity, according to Mr. Tay. And several days later, Kim Jong-il had the Minister of Economic Unity executed within AK-47 is what he told me, which I thought was pretty shocking.

But this is a story about how the government is trying to hold on control the population through manipulating money. And at the end of the day, Bitcoin will prevent them from doing that. So it might be a very far off thing, but I can't imagine that Bitcoin, like in a sort of an umbrella, you know, net kind of impact way is positive for the North Korean government. I mean, maybe short term, fine. but long term, it's a technology that eats away and destroys authoritarianism. Because at the end of the day, all authoritarians hold on to control over their people through financial control. I love it. Okay. Hopefully, hopefully you're right that this will happen over the long term. So I want to ask just sort of generally about regulation because, so I had multiple questions on this, but I'm going to try to wrap it into one.

So we've seen local Bitcoins disabling cash ads, halting operations in Iran. And presumably these are functions that I think you would advocate for and could help people fight authoritarian regimes. So in general, how do you think regulation in the crypto space should be handled? Well, not like that. I think there's a lot of fear. And European regulators seem to be the worst offenders at the moment. It's really sad to see free countries crack down the hardest on this new technology. even harder than dictatorships. It's bizarre.

But, you know, the Finnish government has got to realize that when it basically forces a company like local bitcoins to, you know, whether it's complying by orders from the American government or not, when it forced, or EU orders or whatever, when it forces a company to cut off services in a country like Iran, that it's cutting off a lifeline that's helping people, I wish they would look at it like, how can we help Iranians as opposed to how can we comply with these draconian economic policy? I think that this is just the beginning. I think that centralized exchanges, I don't know if you've seen this, but over the last few days, several other platforms have closed off access to U.S. users. And I think you can start seeing this more and more. And it's a phase we're going to go through where at first governments just for a long time, of course, didn't understand or didn't know about cryptocurrency and Bitcoin. And then they sort of laughed it off. and now they're starting to take it seriously, you know, and now they're going to start to crack down a little bit.

I think the worst is obviously yet to come when it starts actually eating away at their power, but we may not be there for a little while. But I think you're going to start to see more and more attacks. I mean, India has already, you know, really restricted the ability of exchanges to operate in that country, obviously not a great thing to see in the world's largest democracy, really anti-innovation and kind of tragic.

But you're going to see this happen in Europe. And maybe through the good work of people like CoinCenter, maybe the U.S. government will not do the worst things that it could do. And maybe it'll be a little more open-minded. And I do have some hope that the U.S. government will be a little more open-minded than these European and Indian regulators based on just conversations I've had and things I've heard from U.S. regulators. But we'll see. We'll see. I think it's unquestionably a bad thing to cut off technology access to people living under dictatorships. and I hope that companies see that.

And I've certainly talked to other, I guess, more able just because they're smaller and more nimble. But, you know, companies like, for example, Paxful or companies like, for example, there's like BISC, for example. And what do those do? These are sort of more, we'll say, peer-to-peer marketplaces, more sort of decentralized exchanges, where people rely less on an intermediary in a setup like BISC. But basically, these people are like super excited about being able to provide access to users in places like Iran. So when one exchange gets shut down, the others I think are reacting in an interesting way. So I certainly hope that companies can do what they can to fight off the regulation

and keep services alive in these countries that need it. So you just mentioned a couple of companies. but in general, like which crypto companies or projects are working in areas that you think are the most promising for human rights purposes? Well, I mean, look, it's true to say that even though local Bitcoins has stopped its, you know, services in Iran, that it is overwhelmingly the most important company in the world when it comes to providing liquidity and ability to turn Bitcoin and other, you know, digital assets into local money. It is just absolutely so important in a country like Venezuela, critical, so important in other countries. I mean, it's fairly dominant in places like Nigeria. If you interview people there, fairly dominant in Southeast Asia, very important East Asia. So I think local Bitcoins is kind of a real lifeline right now.

So I hope we can figure out ways to support them and help them, you know, fend off more regulation because people really at the moment need their service. I mean, it's just sort of network effect in that they were there first and that people trust local bitcoins as a brand in these places. But it's really kind of amazing to watch the volume in these places. Just to give one example. Today, the volume of exchange in local bitcoins from Bitcoin to Bolivar is multiple times that of the Caracas stock exchange. Yeah, I saw you wrote that. Yeah, I mean, I guess to low bar, because who's, you know, investing in Venezuela in stock market.

But it's paradigm shift, right? And probably one of many. Like in the future, crypto exchanges will be much larger than stock markets. Like I think this is the first example. This isn't just like some hypothetical I came up with. I'm reporting an actual fact. So yes, it's in an extreme economic example of dystopian one, I would say. But I think things are going to get worse before they get better in a lot of places. And again, cryptocurrency is going to be a serious alternative option for folks. All right. So I think the last questions I have for you are just about like where people can learn more about you and HRF. But also I noticed so HRF accepts Bitcoin for donations. Yes. How popular is it for people to do that? Over time. Do you like immediately converted or do you keep the Bitcoin? Yeah. So these are interesting questions. So we started receiving Bitcoin donations in 2014. And they've been very helpful over the years. I certainly would encourage people to send them to us. We generally have a policy of converting the Bitcoin into dollars to spend them on operating programs. But if you write us with a note with your intention that you'd like us to keep it, this is something I'm looking into with the help of certain people,

of basically setting up a sort of an ability for you to make a donation in Bitcoin to us, for example, that we would agree to hold on to us for a certain amount of time. So I really like this idea and certainly if, you know, listeners want to help me design this, give legal advice, et cetera, I would very much welcome that. You can reach me at Alex at HRF.org or on Twitter at Gladstein, my handle. So we would very much be open to like, say long-term Bitcoin donations and donations of other cryptocurrencies if that's something you're interested in. And I would just lay out like as a final thought, like,

the four things that we would like to, that the Human Rights Foundation would really like to do in the cryptocurrency space. So number one would be design research, much like what the Open Money Initiative is doing. We'd love to replicate and share some of those findings and procedures around the world so that people can understand what's happening in these countries and that we can design better tools for people who need them. That's number one.

Number two would be public education. So we're doing a lot of public education about Bitcoin cryptocurrencies you know, in medium formats and in events and conferences that are not cryptocurrency related. So, for example, when I write something in time or CNN or I speak at an economist conference, I think that's in many ways very effective compared to like just sort of speaking to the same small group of people, which I know and love, but like we really got to get out to the 99% that don't know anything about cryptocurrency and Bitcoin. So public education is totally key. A third area would be providing opportunities for, let's say, in the case of Bitcoin core development.

So currently, core development is something that's done by not enough people. And a lot of that is because there are just certain niche resources you need to understand, to learn how to code and to meaningfully contribute to Bitcoin Core, for example. So we'd love to try and support people from around the world to come to some of the classes of people like Jimmy Song or Justin Moon or chain code, etc. and be able to have that experience. So that's something I'd love to work on, is sort of diversifying, whether it be from geographical diversity,

gender diversity, et cetera. And the fourth area, which I think is kind of most interesting, is operational security for activists. I mean, if they're authentically, and I can tell you they are authentically interested in receiving Bitcoin payments and sending them,

as opposed to carrying bags of cash on a bus, or, you know, being reliant and fearful about their bank account, they do want to use Bitcoin. But they need to know how to use it and they need to know how to use it safely or as safe as possible. And that's not like easy to find information. You really have to kind of piece that together. And most of these folks are brave entrepreneurial activists, not technologists, right?

So they need like easy to understand guides and mentorship with regard to Bitcoin operational security. So, you know, we'd like to partner with you and anyone else on these areas of design research into global cryptocurrency adoption, public education about Bitcoin, diversifying the people who are doing core development and doing operational security for people who actually want to use the stuff. Great. Well, thank you so much for coming on Unchained. It's been a real pleasure. Thanks for having me. To learn more about Alex and the Human Rights Foundation, check out the show notes inside your podcast player. If you haven't yet taken the Unchained Survey, now is the time.

Go to Surveymonkey.com slash R slash Unchained Survey 2019 to tell us how we can do better at Unchained. And don't forget, those who answer the survey can enter to win one of five free cost of Bitcoin Lightning Nodes, plus a free year of Kosta's gold membership. Thanks Kossop for donating. Uncham is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from factual recording, Anthony Youne, Daniel Nuss, and Rich Struffolino. Thanks for listening.