What Bitcoin Did - Bitcoin and the End of Financial Repression | Alex Gladstein

Episode Date: October 27, 2025

Alex Gladstein is the Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation and author of Check Your Financial Privilege and Hidden Repression. In this episode, Alex explains why Bitcoin is the most powerful tool for human rights in the 21st century, freedom money that protects people from surveillance, censorship, and financial control. Alex breaks down how money evolved from an instrument of freedom to a weapon of control, how governments now use financial repression as their first tool of censorship, and why Bitcoin is the only technology capable of reversing that trend. He discusses his new essay for The Journal of Democracy, how it reframes Bitcoin as a human rights revolution rather than a financial asset, and why even stablecoins ultimately strengthen state power instead of limiting it. THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN RIVER ANCHORWATCH BLOCKWARE LEDN BITKEY Follow: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Alex Gladstein: https://x.com/gladstein or https://primal.net/gladstein

This addresses the issues of people who are being spied on and politically debanked and censored. And it addresses the issues of people who are being debased, rugged, and devalued. The things that affect the most people, billions of people, taking that big red button away from authorities and government officials where they can just say, oh, we're going to make your time and labor worth less. How do we rebel? How do we resist with Bitcoin? You don't see the bigger picture, which is a global revolution happening with tens, if not hundreds of millions of people where we are taking power back. That's a life or death scenario for a lot of people. We are pushing the freedom virus forward, and it's spreading.

And there's no stopping it. Mr. Gladstein, how you doing, man? I'm great. How are you? I'm very good. We're here in Nashville. I know. We've got the HRF Global Bitcoin Summit coming up.

Yeah, last time I saw you, we were in Indonesia. We were in Bali. So I was in your part of the world. Roughly. It's still like a five-hour flight, but it's as close as you get. Closer than the USA. That's for sure. We did a lot surfing.

Yeah, we did some surfing. We did some surfing. We did some speaking to cool bitcoins. A lot of local Bitcoin adoption, which we can get into. I want to know, because I was with you there for a week or so, and then you went off and did a bit of a tour around Southeast Asia. What was that like? Yeah, so one of the things we've been doing at the Human Rights Foundation is taking

alliance of some of our stakeholders some of the world's leading human rights activists some of the world's leading bitcoin developers and builders and traveling together in a particular part of the world uh for you know let's call it a week or two to just see what global a bitcoin adoption is up to and in this particular case we were doing southeast asia so we started indonesia we got to see the the Bitcoin Indonesia conference, which was really interesting. And kind of more importantly, saw the center that they have there, which is this very cool, like three to four story learning center with an outdoor amphitheater and really impressive, consistent programming.

It's a really cool space. And they're doing programming all the time, both in Indonesian and in English, in other languages, and they are pumping out Bitcoiners there. So that was quite something to see. And from there, we went up to Malaysia. And we had some meetings with people in the government there, which was really interesting, just to get a sense of kind of where they are on Bitcoin. And some of us in the group were very interested in the whole thesis that Harris Erfahn and

Alan Farrington are kind of spearheading in terms of Bitcoin as Islamic money or halal money. And that's very relevant in Malaysia. We also met with Malaysian Bitcoin community. We got to meet the folks building the Frost Naps, which is a Malaysian creation, or at least partly made in Malaysia. He's in Aussie, isn't they? Lloyd. Yes, but one of his co-founders in Malaysian.

And they're doing some of the work there, some of the manufacturing there, and it was quite interesting to see that live. We were able to obtain them and start using them. And I think that's a really clever way to do multi-sig. So that was neat. From there, we went up to Chiang Mai, where we got to visit Jimmy Castro's Bitcoin Learning Center, which was fantastic.

I think it's probably one of the most well-made and thoughtful Bitcoin kind of hubs, community spaces in the world. I mean, it's almost the same quality as Bitcoin Park, but it's in Chiang Mai. And it's like three floors, and you enter down a street, and it says, you know, it has a street sign. It's like Bitcoin Learning Center this way, and there's this really cool street mural of all kinds of sort of Thai culture mashed up with Bitcoin. And you get there, and there's a gigantic flag 20 feet high that just has freedom on it. And you go in and it's got a Bitcoin ATM that accepts e-cash. It's got giant white paper poster.

It's got a beautiful podcast studio. It has an event space. Super high end. And they're really positioned well because they're right in the middle of China, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand. So right in the heart of Southeast Asia. So so many people from those countries come there to learn more. So that was very impressive. I was speaking to Jimmy a little bit when we were in Bali.

You're saying they get a lot of people come across from Lao. And Burma. So they have classes in both. of those languages. And I think the way they basically do it is because there's a lot of expats there too. I met a bunch of people who founded Bitcoin companies who live there.

But basically they'll do classes in Thai. They'll do classes in English and they just rotate. From there, we went down to Bangkok. We visited Bob Space, founded by Piccolo and friends, which is really quite cool. Because there, they're focusing more on the sort of deep tech and privacy tech and self-sovereignty tech. We got to see some of the presentations from some of their grantees.

It's basically an incubator. And we've been supporting that. So that's been a lot of fun. And so when you were in, was it Malaysia, you spoke to the government? We spoke to someone who is in the ruling party at a very high level. Okay. But is someone who is a friend of ours from a long time ago. The background is that the leader of Malaysia today used to be a political prisoner.

Oh, I didn't know. And was put in prison by his predecessor. And his name is Anwar Ibrahim, and he's now prime minister. And we helped work on Unwar's case when Anwar was a political prisoner. And he spoke at the Oslo Freedom Forum, the event we do in Norway in 2010. And we helped on his case when he was put in prison after that. And now he got out, and now he's leading the country. So they're trying to figure out their digital asset strategy.

And, you know, CZ's being very aggressive there. Okay. But it's good to know that there's some people who are thinking, very clearly about Bitcoin. But you know, it's a tough situation for most of these folks because there's so many competing interests coming to them, right? Everybody wants a piece, you know? But it was good to go and provide some like straightforward talk on why Bitcoin.

And I imagine there's a lot of people trying to throw money at them to do things that are in their interest. Z, yeah, yeah, of course. But he must get the necessity for freedom money with his background, you would imagine. I think we're going to get there. You know, I think it's just a tough road, but I think we get there. And in any event, to kind of marry that point to Thailand, after we visited Bob Space, we did an event at the Thai Parliament, which is a spectacular building and very storied history in Thailand of democracy and then no democracy and military coup and democracy again and back and forth and back and forth. And we were there at the behest of a guy named Thanatorn, who is one of the opposition leaders of the country. And he actually won an – his party sort of won an election during COVID time, like 2020, 2021.

And he was one of the leaders of that new government, and he walked into parliament and was only a formal leader for a few minutes. And then the sort of military government and the royals and some other sort of regime forces kind of dissolved his party. So they also sort of tried to ban him for life for running for political office. And they do this to like anyone who really threatens the system. But now he's still working away, and even though he can't personally be, you know, a contender, his colleagues are, and they look like they're going to be very competitive in the election in February. And do they have free and fair elections? No, but the question is, at what point will they respect the will of the people? And it's not this sort of North Korea type thing.

Like, it is very possible that in February they win so overwhelmingly that the old guard has to negotiate. So it's going to be very interesting. But that person, you know, is very interested in Bitcoin. And that group of people is very interested in Bitcoin. So we got to do an event in front of media, human rights groups, all sorts of people from across Thai society. And we talked about Bitcoin and we talked about Noster. And instead of the usual, well, you know, that you encounter in the United States or in Australia or in the UK, isn't it criminal money or what about the environment? No, none of that.

Just I want to know more. Tell me more. Can we use it for fundraising? You know, can we use it to raise money for political parties? Can we use it to get money to sister countries? You know, can protesters use it? It was fascinating. They just didn't have any of the financial privileges that blinds, I think, Western politicians and Western civil society people and Western NGOs.

They were much more like, we are hearing what you're saying and we want to know more. And it was fascinating. And I think that country is going to be one of the leaders, I think, in the next decade in terms of Bitcoin adoption by just different parts of the country there. This episode is brought to you by River, and they've just launched a very cool new product where you can automatically buy every price dip. Their zero fee recurring buys are a proven way to build wealth with Bitcoin, and you can now supercharge them and buy up to 100% more

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Visit iran.com to learn more, which is iriareen.com. And when they're interested in Bitcoin adoption, what kind of thought? Because, like, is it, are they thinking of a strategic Bitcoin reserve in a way of like? No, no, no, no, operationally. Okay. Remember, they're not in government. Now, once they come into government, we don't know what that looks like. But right now, they're in opposition movement.

So they need to fund political parties and election monitoring and, you know, civil movements all across the country. They need to fund lawyers. They need to fund people who've been debanked. They need to work with sister groups in other countries that are even more hardcore dictatorships like Cambodia and Burma. So for them, it's an operational tool. They're not thinking about it as like a financial asset for their economy. So you weren't talking to them about the, you know, the IMF book you wrote in ways that they can get out of those kind of perpetual debts and things like that.

No, I mean, I think that that's a conversation for once they're in power, right? So this is this is about Bitcoin is Freedom Money for people who are critics of the current government and who are opponents. Once you're in power, then those are different, different factors and different considerations. I mean, I think there's no way you could have segues that better into your latest piece, why Bitcoin is Freedom Money. I needed this piece. We've spoken about this on the podcast before, but with the growing just constant talk of sort of the financialization of Bitcoin

has being used in different power structures. It's nice to hear a piece about freedom money again. Because when I was first getting interest in Bitcoin, that was the narrative. And it seems to have fallen back a little bit to this, you know, how it's infiltrating Wall Street or those kind of conversations. Through 2018, 19, it really was. And then we've had a, you know, the sailorization and the Wall Streetization and the

black rockization and the ETFization of Bitcoin. And I listened to the show you did with Pete Rizzo. And it was interesting because he was talking about the different narratives and who holds power in each cycle. And I think in that case, he's reading it correctly. Like there's a current narrative that is very dominant now that Bitcoin is a financial asset alone. And people don't really like to talk about the freedom properties. And that's so different from the early, the first decade, you know, essentially. But the original use case for Bitcoin remains the use case.

You know, the first actual documented probably real-life use case for Bitcoin outside of people experimenting with it in a small scale was probably WikiLeaks. Fundraising in Bitcoin when their fiat rails were shuttered. And that continues to be the use case for Bitcoin, in my view. So for background, I didn't choose the title, which is really, quite nice that they chose one that I like. I think another other contender was, why do dictators to test Bitcoin, which also would have been good. But this one's, this is a classic. So happy they chose why Bitcoin is Freedom Money. Just for background, the Journal of Democracy is a top 10 global

academic journal in political science. When I was a political science student 20 years ago, it was one of the things we read all the time in our classes. And we would use these chapters and essays in this journal which is a quarterly you know as as as cortex in our work so this essay is going to be read by a lot of students and a lot of teachers which I was very excited to see it's also a top academic journal it is also very establishment it's not some sort of radical thing it's actually something that is funded by the US Congress not not the White House or let's say the State Department or something like that but

But essentially when the idea of America as a, and obviously we can differ about the effectiveness or the, let's say the honesty of it, but a lot of American bodies were set up to promote democracy during, especially during the Cold War, right? And one of them was the National Endowment for Democracy, which has a budget of two, three hundred million dollars a year. And one of the things that it works on

is this project, which is a journal, And they publish debates and discourse about, you know, the evolution or the regression of democracy. So it was actually here last year that the editor in Nashville at the Global Bitcoin Summit, I brought him here as a guest, a friend of ours, Sergei Popovich, who's an activist who helped bring down the Milosevic regime in Serbia in the 90s, peacefully without a shot fired. Serge introduced me to this person, and this person came here and started to get very interested in Victor. in Bitcoin and Bitcoin related stuff. And in the time since, they published about a year and a half ago,

like a small blog type post for me on their website that was very popular. And this spring, they invited me to do a full essay in their print edition, which I was super excited about. It's long. It's like 8,500 words. But it gave me the space to run in terms of I wanted to go deep into essentially the historic backtrane. How did money move from an instrument of freedom to a tool of control, which, you know, is, I think, hinted out a lot in Lin-Alton's essay.

Why is there a banking crisis in human rights work today? Case studies. Let's look at Afghanistan. Let's look at Togo. Let's look at Cuba. Let's look at Hong Kong. Let's look at Belarus. Let's look at some of these other places.

I wanted to look at FUD, and I wanted to kind of tackle some of the biggest FUD that I thought academics and students and NGOs would be facing, which largely revolved around things like volatility, lack of adoption by merchants, the environment piece and the criminality piece. So I tackle all of that in the essay. A very important thing that a lot of academics asked me to put in here is why Bitcoin and not crypto or blockchain. So I have a whole section on why Bitcoin and not crypto or blockchain. And in fact, if someone says they're doing something with crypto or blockchain but can't

be specific, huge red flag, huge red flag right away. In fact, anyone who really uses the word blockchain outside of a highly technical discourse about Bitcoin. A massive red flag, obviously. If someone has like a, you know, the word blockchain in their ex profile or LinkedIn, just immediately dismiss this person. I mean, I literally recently brought on an assistant to help me with just running things. And one of the things that I gave them advice on in terms of like monitoring inbox and stuff

is if it says defile blockchain, just immediate. But I had to say that, right? And then a little bit about the fact that this is, this is not some experiment. This is a huge global movement where I was. relying on some of the data from the recent Cornell study, global Bitcoin adoption, 25,000 respondents in dozens of countries and, you know, looking at sales of hardware wallets, which is way past 10 million, and then looking at downloads of self-custodial phone wallets, tens of millions, and looking at just exchange filings. And even Coinbase alone has more than 100 million users.

And, you know, obviously a majority of them use Bitcoin. So we're talking. about tens if not hundreds of millions of people here at one stop or another on their Bitcoin journey yeah now most of them are at the beginning where they don't really quite understand it and they may be viewed it as something to trade but still they've begun the journey and then the journey goes from there and if you've got more than 10 million people buying you know the top couple uh hardware wallet manufacturers that actually release numbers i mean the real numbers are bigger than that but you know we're talking about serious numbers of people around the world who are self-custodial bitcoin users in a true sense and this thing is um revolutionizing human rights work and i

really just wanted to put that in a very straightforward way with tons of documentation so that it could no longer be denied and i'm really grateful to the folks at the jod for for helping me put that in there in a in a platform and format that can't just be dismissed because I love writing for places like Bitcoin Magazine or whatever, but obviously if I try to show up to a fight with Bitcoin Magazine article, I get immediately dismissed because it's biased, you know, is what they would say. Now, if it's in the Journal of Democracy, Print Edition, okay. Now we're doing something a little different, right?

And you can see, like the way you approach the article is different because it was in the Journal of Democracy, not in Bitcoin. You've got to know your audience, yeah. You kind of started from the ground up and then built the entire picture throughout the argument. Yeah, I mean, the thing I tried to work on at the beginning was trying to lay out how like Bitcoin, like financial repression itself is so widespread and affects so many people, way more than political repression if you think about it. Like not that many people are professional politicians or human rights workers, but everybody uses of money, right? And yet financial repression is just never talked about in the human rights industry outside of the work we're doing, really, to be honest, and a few other people. but it's getting there.

But like five to ten years ago, nobody talked about it. And yet it is so important, and it never gets the airtime that election rigging or political prisoners or censorship in the media gets. And it should be right there. I mean, financial repression should be right there with censorship of the media, sacking of justices, you know, rigging constitutions, fabricating elections, debanking and financial. introsensorship is right there. I mean, if not more widespread. So I think people are finally waking up to it and it's time that hopefully any group that's pursuing a liberty-minded cause, a freedom-minded cause to empower the people in their country, starts using this as a tool. And I hope this can be a nice little helpful conversation starter, if not a blueprint. What was nice

as they gave me a little space in the essay to do like a 101 of like, well, how do I begin? And it's like, great, use these tools, consider collaborative custody, maybe you want to do self-custody, don't use KYC exchanges. You know, it allowed me a little bit of space to start to point to like, how do you get started? And then of course, we have, HRF has a webinar, we do every quarter that brings you zero to one at least

in a couple of days with BTC sessions and our friend Anna Chekovich. And they lead that. So they allowed me to mention that in there, which was pretty cool. That's very cool. I'm actually recording with sessions straight after this. Fantastic. This is a perfect segue.

But let's start with the money being a tool that used to be used in a relatively free and fair and open way when things were just cash to the progression to basically everything now being digital and what the problems are for sort of people that you're helping around the world. Yeah, and I think Linaldon in her book traces this extremely well in broken money that scientifically, technologically, this was kind of going to happen 100 times out of 100. the Fiat credit control system just advanced faster than the hard money system. Like hard money, we had gold, and then we just didn't really have an innovation for a very long time until Bitcoin. Whereas Fiat money, with the invention of the telegraph

and the invention of wireless communication and computers and credit cards, it just had a tsunami of innovation. So it was always going to sort of outpace hard money in her view. I hope I'm not misquoting her, but basically that's sort of the idea of part of the book is she's looking at the scientific evolution of money.

And she's basically pointing out that like money had been on a almost like inevitable evolution due to technological advancements of becoming more and more a tool of credit and more and more tool of control. And then we forked finally with Bitcoin. And now we have a way of evolving money in a way that makes it more and more a tool of freedom.

And in the paper, what I describe is how, look, 50 years ago, it was very hard to micro-track the economy. If most people are using cash or even check, it's just hard to, like, run models and understand what people are going to do next or try to locate people's behavior or preferences. But today, when everything is done digitally with chips and Bluetooth tracking devices and stores

and every payment's linked to your ID. It's trivial for governments to understand what's going on and start to model and control and censor. And obviously, AI tooling and big data has made that even easier and more scary. So in a way, you know, financial repression like we have today just wasn't really possible 40, 50 years ago. But over the last 20 years,

it's become pretty much the first and foremost tactic used by authoritarians to censor and stop their. critics and it's high time that it's recognized as such in the literature in the academic collegiate you know establishment literature that financial repression is is a first tool of autocrats and how do we rebel how do we resist with bitcoin there's a line that you wrote in this which was what you spend says more about you than what you say um and i thought that was super interesting And I do remember hearing that Amazon will know that you're pregnant before you do based on your buying habits. Yeah, I remember that.

And these are the things that are terrifying about moving to a, even if it's not full-blown CBDC, which I think we are seeing. Like you say, there's over 100 countries now looking into this. Like we're moving to a more surveilled, more tracked system. Yeah. And even, look, we're concerned about CBDCs, but let's be clear, governments with cooperation, with private corporations, can essentially approximate a CBDC already. Yeah. like bank credits and fintech credits, you know, are freezable at will, are censorable. And ultimately, I think stable coins will follow that course. They don't give an escape from this either.

And really what I wanted to do in the paper was hit, like, the different aspects of Bitcoin, you know, digital cash and it's digital gold. So I opened with, you know, on the one hand, this addresses the issues of people who are being spied on and politically debanked and censored. And on the other hand, it addresses the issues of people who are being debased, rugged, and devalued, and have had their currency demonetized or confiscated. So these are the two ways in which authoritarian use money as a weapon, and Bitcoin is a shield against both of them, which is so important. These other digital currency technologies that are privacy-minded, you know, we can debate about which ones are honest and which ones are scams. But at the end of the day, none of them are hard money. So they can really only attack the privacy piece. Now, I think eCash is the best version of them personally.

But again, eCash is just a credit. It's an IOU. You need the hard money piece. So the thing has to be built with Bitcoin. And if you can build a Bitcoin system where you have the $21 million protecting you against, what is usually the biggest crime in, let's say, monetary repression globally, which is the devaluation? overnight and you and I saw this when we went to Malawi a few years ago where we arrived a few

weeks after the government had done a 44% overnight currency devaluation which I consider a crime against humanity because nobody got to vote for that nobody got to weigh in on that all of a sudden just 44% of their wealth was gone 44% of the purchasing power was vanished this removes that option from governments if you're saving and using Bitcoin they can't touch you that's magical I think that's so so powerful now at the same time you can you can couple that with privacy technologies it's not as straightforward as we'd like but it's easy enough these days and it's guessing back to them and and i think people sometimes misunderstand permissionlessness versus privacy yes like full anonymous e-cash level privacy is very

important but oftentimes just the fact that you can use bitcoin without your id is is a huge upgrade over the current system. Like, yes, I understand that anyone can look at blockchain data. Sure. But if you've never attached your name to it, it's freaking useless. So it's like I'm always arguing with Monaro and Zcash people about this. Like, you have to give something to the permissionless piece. It's not just the fact that there's, you know, whether or not it's shielded transactions or not.

It's like, no, I bought this with cash or whatever. You've no idea who owns this? And then I moved to someone else. And it's just, if you've never attached your ID to the blockchain, it's, it's, you know, provably harder to track and understand what's going on. And basically, my point is that people face a lot of issues around the world, in the world of democracy promotion, human rights promotion, you know, national movements of different kinds in different places,

independent media, environmentalism, journalism, so many different, again, movements of people trying to change their country or society or trying to prevent radical change, one or the other. And money and banking and debanking and debatforming is becoming like the front line. And that is finally being recognized in, you know, a prestigious journal, which I'm just super, super happy to have that opportunity. And the debanking thing, while I know it's happening in a lot of the, these sort of oppressive regimes, but it's happening in like the UK. This isn't even like,

oh yeah, it's a really, really scary part of like the political world that we live in now. But can we get really basic? Because what I loved about this is that it's going to hit an entirely different audience. Yes. In fact, it's not even a narrative. Like this is just the story of Bitcoin. This is just truth. I think narrative almost minimizes it. And it's a really powerful way of getting people interested in Bitcoin. And what I think will be cool is I think this is the kind of show that people will want to share with friends and family who might be interested in Bitcoin but skeptical and this shows them what it can actually do.

So in the piece, you write about Roya Mabob's story in Afghanistan. Can you tell that story? Sure. Look, it was 2013. Roya is a businesswoman in Afghanistan and she's starting a company that employs a lot of women around the country.

And there is no mobile money in Afghanistan at the time. Most Western financial products that we get to use the United States or whatever, like Venmo, PayPal, like, aren't there. They're not available for Afghans for different reasons. And if she tries to pay them in cash or through, like, the Hawala system, which is the traditional way of, like, moving money around, the male relatives of the women take the money. So they don't really, for different reasons, have bank accounts. So she's sitting there and trying to figure out, well, how can I pay them? And a friend of hers tells her about Bitcoin.

And it's Q1, Q2, 2013. Bitcoin's like 30, 40 bucks. And she's like, why not? And they figure it out and they start using basic wallets and things are just so different back then. But, you know, she goes on this roller coaster ride where Bitcoin goes from 30 bucks to 100 bucks to 500 bucks to $1,200 bucks, and then through all the Gok stuff, you know, starts to crash.

And it cascades all the way down to $200, basically, something like that. And all throughout this, she feels all the emotional. right she's like wow this is incredibly liberating but wow also very risky and she goes through this all and at the end of it she decides to pivot her business a little bit away from that but incorporate it into a charity that she has started to educate girls in afghanistan so one of the first things she does when she's educating what ends up being tens of thousands of women when she's educating just literacy science math and is this something that had been banned by the taliban Well, as you know, any education of older girls is banned.

They haven't been to school in, I think, 13, 1,400 days or something like that since the takeover. But at the time, it was the American occupation, and there was a more secular government in power, and they were okay with this. And Roya ends up, again, like, teaching tens of thousands of girls about everything from robotics to using computers to Bitcoin and how to use Bitcoin. And after the takeover in 2021, you couldn't use the U.S. dollar to get money in. The whole economy was collapsing. Everything was cut off, but you could use Bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn't care. Bitcoin works, right?

And that's what she does today. So even though the Taliban officially prevents women in elementary, middle school, et cetera, from going to school and becoming educated, Roya runs underground schools and she pays the teachers in Bitcoin. And it's amazing. And it's a really great example for people listening of whenever they hear someone in the FFT or the economist or in the broadsheets or on TV say, oh, Bitcoin has no use case. The dollar and the pound cannot do this. You cannot technologically use the dollar or pound to fund underground schools in Afghanistan, but you can use Bitcoin.

So just remember that. That's a very powerful use case of what Bitcoin can do. That fiat money cannot. So I wanted to include that story in here because it might be a surprising one for some people. I think it'll be a surprising one for a lot of people who haven't been paying close attention to Bitcoin. And it's not like this is a one-off story. This stuff is happening all over the world now. Yeah, and it's also an example of the duality of Bitcoin where that's kind of the digital cash side of it, where you don't need permission to use it.

Anyone can use it. It's the same for the billionaire and the refugee. It doesn't care about your birth or ethnicity or gender or background, and that's just such a beautiful thing about Bitcoin. But also the digital gold part of it played a huge. huge role in as much as the early adopters of this thing did very well like her one of her sisters at that time in the 13 2013 2014 period when women wanted to buy stuff with bitcoin and the merchant wouldn't accept it she would she would buy the bitcoin from them give them cash and she saved that and over three four or five years used it to pay for her education at

cornell university she's amazing um there was another woman who worked for for roya and named Leila. And she had to escape Afghanistan and was one of the countless Afghans who fled over through Iran, dangerously, through Turkey, on a boat, got to Europe, made it to Germany, lives life there now, and was able to take her seed phrase with her, start a new life. And by the time she got there, Bitcoin had like quadrupled in value and she was able to start new life. So, you know, refugees throughout history didn't have that ability. Like I have some ancestors who fled the Holocaust, for example. They just fled with, what was on their back, you know, they had no way.

But people today fleeing from Syria, you know, whether it was fleeing from Syria or Venezuela several years ago, fleeing from Gaza or Yemen or Sudan today, they can take their value with them. They can convert value to Bitcoin and they can take it with them. And that's amazing.

And we're gonna hear a story tomorrow about that at the Global Bitcoin Summit about someone who, whose life was saved by Bitcoin. And that's gonna be a keynote speech, someone from the Middle East who, who had to flee bombing and war and was able to do it and was able to do it because of Bitcoin. So it's a very powerful thing that people just,

you'd never know when you just sit there and look at price and price charts and financialization and out competing inflate, just all this, the rhetoric you see, you don't see the bigger picture, which is a global revolution happening with tens, if not hundreds of millions of people where we are taking power,

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Last time we spoke, one of the things I said to you is a quote from Thomas Pachia, who said that we're all going to be rich and depressed because the project failed. And that is the idea of like freedom money dying along the way. But since then, I've thought a lot about that. And I actually think that as long as someone out there is using Bitcoin as freedom money, then it's all been worth it. Like these stories can't happen without Bitcoin. And it's pretty incredible. I don't know if you agree with that.

I think the percentage of people using Bitcoin as freedom money as a whole, will almost certainly shrink. But as long as people still have the ability to transact with Bitcoin in any way they see fit, then this project has been entirely worth it. Well, there's different levels there, right? So one level is Bitcoin slowly replacing fiat currency as a global money.

And that might mean store of value, medium of exchange unit of account. And that's the thing that prevents the biggest crimes, which are theft by inflation and currency devaluation. The things that affect the most people, billions of people, taking that big red button away from authoritarian and government officials where they can just say, oh, we're going to make your time and labor worth less. In a Bitcoin world, regardless of whether or not people are using it as freedom of money

or IOUs of Bitcoin or whatever, if Bitcoin gets to the point where it is the the unit of account, we win there. That's a massive victory. Now, it could even be better. And we have a talk on that by Jeremy Rubin here in the next few days. That's gonna be very interesting. Because I think it's a massive victory,

but it's a partial victory. Because ultimately, what we'd like is for everybody to be able to be self-custodial, have control of their money, and be able to spend it without paperwork and in a way that protects privacy. And I think that's a more challenging vision. I personally think that Bitcoin is really quite destined to become the unit of account of the world eventually. I just think everything is moving in that direction.

It's relationship with energy markets, with global trade, with the way the rival world works, with the way that we gravitate towards a one currency, and with the way that nation states, which aren't going anywhere, really, and empires, which last hundreds, if not thousands of years as they rise and fall, they don't want to be using someone else's money, ultimately, to save in. And they don't want to be subject to those people's rules.

So the idea of one neutral currency, I think, is very powerful, has a lot of gravity to it. But can the citizens use it with the same degree as freedom as the rulers is the question? We don't know that. There are going to be tradeoffs and sacrifices, right? Like, can a day laborer? in 100 years afford an on-chain Bitcoin transaction.

Not today. Meaning the SAT value, the Satoshi value of transactions will likely, you know, maybe not increase that much. Or may even get cheaper in some ways due to like interesting ways we can do collaborative spending and things like that. But the SAT itself is going to increase. and value so much against the dollar and fiats that, you know, it very, well, could be a world where only a small percentage of people on earth can afford to just be on chain alongside corporations and governments. So the question is, well, what can we do about that? And there's a lot

you can do. You can do side chains, key sharing things, you know, I can trade a private key without having to spend anything on the blockchain. There's a lot of interesting stuff around that. There's stuff around, for example, cross-input signature aggregation where you can reduce the Bitcoin-denominated cost of a transaction by collaboratively working together. And there's many other ideas in that area. There are reasonable trade-offs you can make with things coming up

that are now starting to be unrolled like Arc or even Spark, where with a particular trade-off, you know, people can kind of have self-custody Bitcoin in a way. I say kind of. I'm qualifying not fully, but kind of. Not as much as Bitcoin on chain or lightning, of course, but in a way, they can have it and they don't have to pay a year's worth of wages, let's say, maybe in the future.

So I'm very optimistic, actually. Basically what I'm saying is I think it's a lock that Bitcoin eventually overthrows fiat as like the global dominant kind of currency and like the way we think about how much things are valued. But it remains unclear whether it actually is free to money for everybody. But I think we have a pretty good shot. And I think it continues to grow. I mean, if you think about what's available today, just all these different options of ways

to use Bitcoin with lightning as a connective tissue between things rolling out like Spark and Arc and eCash and side chains and even just different liquids, liquid platforms and swaps. I mean, it's pretty amazing compared to 10 years ago. Like you can vary, like some of these wallets make it so easy to just spend some of your Bitcoin privately in a way that's not really possible to tie back to you. So I'm bullish on it, but like that's the big challenge. I don't really see a world where government controlled and abused money that's being inflated to infinity retains top dog status in the monetary hierarchy. I just don't see that.

I see Bitcoin becoming that. I guess it's just a question of, you know, can everybody use it equally, which is more or less the case today. Like when fees are so low, you know, you can essentially, if you're not worried about the speed, you're receiving a remittance or you're making a payment and it doesn't need to arrive right away, like a salary or a wage or something, I mean, you can pay like a few cents and you can get it through.

I don't think that's going to be the case in 20 to 50 years. No. So we have to think big about that. So I think it's really easy to often think that Bitcoin doesn't change because it doesn't. Like the actual underlying Bitcoin protocol does not change very quickly at all. But like all of those things... The layers changed, too. Exactly.

That's what I'm saying. So like Spark, Arc, e-cash. These didn't exist two years ago. Even just wallet UX. Yeah. Like we're moving it. Like I think a breakneck pace. It's crazy.

Sometimes maybe miss that because... And regulatory stuff matters a lot. And the US can lead the way that. So that's why I applaud the work BPI is doing and stuff. Like, look, if the US passes a de minimis tax type law where like you can use Bitcoin under, I don't know, whatever it is, one or $2,000 or $2,000 without worrying about taxes, that immediately has major ramifications for like every tax authority on the planet, right? So I think that our government can set certain standards that can help in our quest to use Bitcoin as money.

I think what Square, or rather Block now is working on with the Square readers, and that is slowly being activated. And I think by the end of the year, it sounds like, will be an option for sure. That's very cool. For 4 million square readers in the United States and beyond, where merchants will be able to accept Bitcoin, and they'll just, they'll get money.

They'll get Viat money. They'll get dollars that people could spend Bitcoin. And then they'll have the option of taking the Bitcoin if they want. And this is all done through their system where they have, you know, the reader and the cash app and the BitKee. It's a really interesting little ecosystem they have set up. And I think that's going to be very exciting.

And then you know, you've seen this happening in even more kind of permissionless wild west kind of setting around the world where you have apps like Tando and Bitcoin Jungle and ones being built in Brazil and Ghana and Thailand where there's different ways for you just to spend your Bitcoin, you know, to the merchant. And I think the Pay Me and Bitcoin thing is really what is how we're going to win. if we want Bitcoin to become more than just kind of like the monetary standard, but we're still trapped by a lot of the current constraints. I mean, that is a half victory, but I think the full victory is paying me in Bitcoin

becomes standard. And some of the ways we're getting there now are really interesting. Like in Thailand, there's this thing where you can pay a mobile Fiat QR code thing. And what's happening is you pay it via an app and you send lightning. And someone manually, someone manually, manually pays the Fiat right there, but they're sitting at their computer waiting because they take a fee and they just pay it

and you walk out of the store. Like it's fast enough that you buy a beer and within 30 seconds it's paid and you're on your way. And what's happened there is like on the back end, someone got an alert to pay this thing and they pay it using their TIEBot and they get the Bitcoin. That's fascinating.

So there's something like that are kind of hacks. And then there are others that are more elegant where like Tando and Kenya, like you get into the cab. I talk about this in the essay and the cab driver accepts M-Pesa and they whip out the, you know, the app or the QR for you to pay them at the end of the ride. And you use the Tando app and the cab driver gets there M-Pesa and you spend your Bitcoin. And you didn't have to tell anybody that you went to Kenya. You'd have to like call your credit card company. You just used permissionless Bitcoin and it works. And there's a lot of places where that's.

that's coming alive. So I think the Pay Me and Bitcoin thing, the more service providers we can use that accept Bitcoin, the more graphic designers, AV technicians, architects, you know, goods and services providers, tourism operators, event companies, restaurants. I mean, you're seeing it happen. It's slowly but surely. And it's not going to happen in the like hardcore evangelical way that the B cashers tried to do it a long time ago, where they would sort of force people to do something you don't understand. It has to be organic. Like the merchant has to really, like, want it, right?

Or else they're just, it's not going to work. You can't go door to door being like, you'll accept Bitcoin, put the sticker here. You're seeing in El Salvador, that doesn't work. You can't brute force it. But slowly but surely, like through some of these Bitcoin educational hubs, people come, they drop in on a class, they think it's interesting, they read a little more,

they pick up a book, they decide to download the software, they watch one of VTC sessions videos, and all of a sudden they're accepting tips in Bitcoin or they're doing some work in Bitcoin and it's happening and it's very exciting to see and I talk about that in this essay that Bitcoin is freedom money because of that aspect of it.

Why do you, what part of the Pay Me and Bitcoin sort of circular economy thing do you like the most? Is it the fact that this allows people to, you know, if there's someone there selling Bitcoin for cash, you get non-KYC Bitcoin and then you keep that within a certain community? Or is it just the sort of the mindset set change of instead of people taking their local currencies, they're demanding to be paid in a hard money. Well, let's look at Thailand. So Thailand's trying to set something up where, like,

you enter Thailand as a tourist and you can actually convert your Bitcoin into what is essentially a CBDC upon entry. And like all merchants will accept it via Fiat government order. Well, you know what? If the merchants decide to accept Bitcoin, we can sidestep that whole control process. You can enter, you can just go wherever and you can be on your merry way peer to peer without the government having rent or control. I think that's a simple way to think about it. Like, if we want to sidestep and get away from the increasing kind of, whether it be privately run or publicly run CBD stuff, CBDC stablecoin stuff, it's pay me in Bitcoin. And like, I think eventually people are going to be wise and up. Like, do you really want to be paid in stable coins? Like, I know that a lot of people do today

because their currency sucks compared to the dollar. But eventually, as Bitcoin continues to grown value and the dollar continues to collapse. People are going to want Bitcoin, dude. Like, we've seen this at HRF. Four or five years ago, a lot of NGOs and activists did want stable coins. Like, they actually wanted it. But now, like, we haven't heard a single group. We do hundreds and hundreds of grants around the world.

No one's asking us for tether or circle. They want Bitcoin. And, you know, they're in a particular use case. Like, they're activists. But still, I think that's kind of an interesting tell. I can understand why you would want access to stablecoins if you live in a country with And I talk about it. That is a very valid use case for if you want to talk about cryptocurrency Beyond Bitcoin. I mean stable coins are really the other main use case. That's not an obvious scam

You know, but I do think as I wrote about recently in an essay in Reason like they they do extend state power and they help the US address the debt concerns and they kind of keep the Ponzi scheme going. So I understand understand why people use them, I empathize. We have to understand they are not freedom money at all. And they are not what Satoshi was trying to do. And they are not in any way, cypherpunk or, you know, I mean, look, they, again, they extend fiat network effect globally. And they kind of keep the system alive and growing in a new way.

How do we make sure that they don't become just another arm of the government and essentially like a CBDC type instrument? Meaning stable coins? Yeah. Or is it the fact that? Because you just can always opt out into Bitcoin, that's not a concern. There are interesting experiments with doing stable coins in a way that are not tied to a reserve and tied to a banking system and tied to buying U.S. debt.

But ultimately, anything dollar denominated is pro-dollar. Like, you know, I don't care how you do it, how you get your stable coin. Or whether it's on the Lightning Network or whether it's like a stable channel on Lightning or whether it's Tether on Lightning or whatever. Some of that stuff may be on a scale, like, better than like Tether on Tron or whatever. I get it. But if it's USD denominated, it supports the dollar hegemony fiat system. That's why it needs to be Bitcoin denominated, like to create a resistance, to create an alternative.

It's all about the unit of account. Okay. Again, thinking about who, at least I'm going to send this conversation to, there's people that I know should be interested in Bitcoin. They're not quite there. I want to send them a show that can lay out what Bitcoin actually does. Why Bitcoin not crypto? Well, I mean, think about it this way. There's 20,000 some odd cryptos.

They range from obvious jokes like Shiba Inu or Dogecoin to politician coins like Trump coin or Melania coin, to NFTs that have gone to zero, to obvious scams. So many obvious scams where people have gone to prison for launching them. They are all, and I write about this, like their sole existence is to enrich the creators at the expense of you, the retail person. Unless you have insider information,

you're going to lose money on these things over time. And they all go to zero in Bitcoin terms. There was something interesting the other day about Zcash. People are going crazy because Zcash went up like 45, 50% in dollar terms in a day. And you look at, but you look at the Zcash Bitcoin chart.

You can't even see it if you see it. It's collapsed so badly against Bitcoin over the last decade. So these are rugs, you know, and be careful. If you want something that is going to retain purchasing power over a long period of time and has a global network effect and is trusted by all kinds of people in adversarial scenarios and has, again, increased in value over time in a consistent manner, it's Bitcoin. I mean, even Ethereum is nowhere close to its high in Bitcoin terms.

Like, again, don't look at dollar terms. Look at Bitcoin terms. At one point, one-eath could get you 0.15 Bitcoin. Today, it's 0.03 or something like that. So you have to think about it in Bitcoin terms. How much Bitcoin can these alt-coins get you? And over time, it goes to zero. It goes to zero. They may in a vacuum be going up against the dollar, because everything's going up against the dollar. Gold today, as we record, just hit $4,000. So the dollar is losing its place. I mean, it's still by far the king of fiat's,

but it's slowly losing its place as the only way to do store of value, meaning of exchange unit of account. I mean, and Bitcoin is, is slowly rising. I mean, this should be obvious to anyone who's looking. I don't think there's ever been a more clear signal than J.P. Morgan coming out with their debasement trade about gold and Bitcoin. Yeah. Like, everyone is waking up to this. Yeah. And then eventually people wake up to the fact that Bitcoin does what gold does, but better. Yeah. But people aren't there yet. And, and, you know, but look, as we're speaking,

less than 24 hours ago, Bitcoin was at 126, which is just crazy to think about. Like, again, that is a real thing that saves people. lives like these Cubans i was interviewing that i talked about in the essay five years ago bitcoin was trading around five thousand dollars and they were faced with a choice their currency was being changed by the Cuban government you know essentially used to trade at like 24 to a dollar and the government would struggle to keep that peg and you know the real market value would usually be lower but once they were once they basically stopped protecting that peg it hyperinflated and in the last five years now it's more than 400 pays

so it's per dollar on the black market. So it's lost more than 95% of its value. Okay. Or like the dozens of Cubans I interviewed, you could have started stacking sats and converting into Bitcoin at the time. And think about that. Now you're up 2530x, okay,

versus being down 95%. That's a life or death scenario for a lot of people. 100%. And that's just five years. This is not, we're not, We're not going back to throwing your Bitcoin in a dump and not finding a 2010 era of Bitcoin. We're talking about five years ago. We're talking about pandemic era.

And we're up 20 to 30x. So, you know, this is not something that, like, you missed the boat on. It's going to continue to do this. And it's going to continue to be really valuable for people. It's an amazing piece. I'm going to make sure I link it in the show. Are the talk that happening here going to be? recorded.

Yeah, yeah. So basically, this is the third year that the Human Rights Foundation has run the Global Bitcoin Summit. We do it off the record and privately because we really want to make sure that the activists who come, the human rights activists and the folks working in opposition movements have peace of mind when they're talking about these issues because, you know, they're, A, they're nervous about talking about money, they're a little embarrassed because they don't know a huge amount about Bitcoins.

We want to create a safe space for them. that and we bring in just a totally badass crew of elite Bitcoin developers, builders, investors, donors, minors, educators, community builders. And we spend three days together trading notes and learning from each other. And some of the content we'll put up online, yeah. But really, it's just our effort at just continuing to move that needle forward of operationalizing what's in the essay. We are pushing forward Bitcoin as freedom money here.

We're not like pushing it forward as something that you can make a copy of and trade or that you can make a copy of a copy of a copy, like the Nine Inch Nail song, copy of a copy of a copy. Yeah, it's just a copy of a copy of a copy. We're not interested in, you know, cascading derivatives. We are interested in teaching people about how to be self-sovereign and how that can amplify and strengthen. their work opposing tyranny around the world and how it can make them more unstoppable. That's the name of our webinar that we do, is become unstoppable. We want you to be able to fund the investigation or the protest or the movement in a particular place in the world and not be stopped because of monetary technology. And now we can do that with Satoshi's invention, which is quite remarkable. It is literally magic. It's amazing. And that's what I end the piece with is, you know,

Satoshi probably didn't know what was going to happen. They speculated quite a bit. But I think it's fair to say that it's earned that name, Freedom Money for sure by now, regardless of what happens with its price in the future, regardless of the price. I mean, Bitcoin at 3K versus 10K versus 100K versus 4K versus 80K. It doesn't really matter.

It's all free to money. It's always been free to money. And it always can move value from A to B without permission. regardless of your gender or your ethnicity, or regardless of what your colonial occupier or your dictator, or the corporation that exerts power and your structure in your region thinks. It doesn't matter what they all think. You know, Bitcoin can make money move regardless of what they think and how they feel.

And that's really what makes Bitcoin freedom money. And it continues to be that for people around the world. I love it, man. This has obviously gone out to a load of people that aren't Bitcoiners. Yes, yes. Have you had any interesting feedback from it so far? Yes. So as a result, I've been invited to speak at numerous groups that do this kind of work, you know, where they're like, wow, this is really interesting. Will you come in and speak to our teams,

you know, working in this field? And I'm happy to do it. And look, a lot of them are going to be a little nervous about it. They may want to start with stablecoins. That's fun. If that's where they want to be, that's okay. But eventually they're going to realize Bitcoin's better. I mean, stable coins are really tricky. Like, let's not forget, they're not compatible with each other. You need a broker. So Tether on Tron doesn't like pay, you know, tether on Eth or whatever. Like, they're not natively like that.

It's a much more complicated ballgame. And ultimately, they get frozen and they can go to zero, as we saw with Terra Luna, right? So I think that ultimately the ease of Bitcoin being like one global monetary language will win over. even the most hardened skeptics, but it's just going to take time. And I think even though this might be the very first touch point, they might be more interest in stable coins for now, like Bitcoin gets its hooks in you.

Since the first day I learned about Bitcoin, I bet there's not been a single day since I've not thought about it. And I think that happens to a lot of people. We are pushing the freedom virus forward, and it's spreading. And there's no stopping it. So, again, we can debate all day about the crisis in Bitcoin, du jour, you know, going back through the years. but it continues to spread and it continues to work.

And it's something that's really inspiring. I'd feel a lot more depressed about the world if we didn't have this thing out there, which is capable of helping people in the darkest corners of the planet where no one else wants to help. It's there. And that's so cool.

100%. Okay. I'm going to make sure that the links for this are in the show. I'm going to put some videos in the show. But where do you want to send anyone if you want to find out more about you and the Human Rights Foundation? Yeah, we'll check out

the essay and check out our work at atrf.org slash financial freedom if you want to look at all the initiatives we're running and follow me on x at gladstein i have my nostra npub there as well um follow me on the unstoppable social network unique content over there as always and um let's let's stay in touch it's always a pleasure and an honor to be on the show danny so thank you so much no i love it thanks for coming on man i appreciate it my pleasure