Bitcoin as a tool for freedom

Introduction

Alex Gladstein: Well thank you, Arsh. Thank you to the organizers for allowing us to put this together. Jeff and André got in touch with me last year and said they wanted to have a freedom track at this event. I was very excited about that. It’s something that not a lot of folks in the Bitcoin industry often think about. I know that number go up is really exciting. And the ETF is really exciting etc. etc. But what Satoshi tried to create was freedom money, and that remains at the heart of what Bitcoin is. 

Alex: We’re very grateful at the Human Rights Foundation that Atlantis made this possible. For the next few hours, we’re going to have freedom, freedom, freedom content. I think hopefully it’s a time for a lot of us to share thoughts, and ideas, and learn. This is also a very inspiring personal moment for me because three of my heroes are here. Lyn is one of my favorite intellectuals in the world. Farida is one of my favorite activists in the world. And Jack is one of my favorite entrepreneurs in the world. They’ve all done a huge amount to move the needle forward for human freedom. 

Money and freedom

Alex: When we talk about money and freedom, they aren’t usually discussed together. I know this because I’ve been working on human rights conferences and events for about 17 years. For many, many, many years you would never hear anyone from the human rights field talk about currency or money or finances. It was something different. It was something left aside. It was logistical. Over the years I think we started to see why it’s actually really fundamental and critical to the human rights struggle.

Alex: In her book Broken Money, Lyn traces the history of how money evolved through time as different technologies came onto the scene. I figured it would be great for her to start with an overview from the book and her own thinking and writing of how money evolved from something that was at one point fairly neutral to something today that’s become really quite a system of control. I was really struck by that when I read her book. So maybe we can start with that Lyn. 

Lyn Alden: Sure and just like you mentioned money and freedom aren’t often thought in the same thing. But in Broken Money, I had a whole section focused on financial freedom which is somewhat unusual in a book that’s specifically about money and monetary technology and monetary history but I feel like they’re so interlinked, you can’t exclude it if you’re trying to give it the full treatment. 

Lyn: The thing I emphasize in the book is how technology as it changes over time it shifts the incentive structure and takes power from one group to another group in terms of what is easy to do. As an example of that, one form of freedom is freedom from surveillance, having some degree of privacy over your financial transactions, and all those sorts of things.

Lyn: The technology that came over time shifted the burden of where that goes. If you go back to the 1800s, a lot of transactions were naturally private and even the most authoritarian leaders, the idea that they could surveil everybody’s transactions was not even a realistic thought to them. 

Lyn: But over time as the telegraph came out and you know transactions started moving around the speed of light and physical gold couldn’t settle that quickly, things started to centralize on more and more centralized layers.  Basically, the history of money in banking is that almost every friction of money that people ran into, they solved it with another layer of centralization.

Lyn: They said if me and Alex are trying to trade, for example, we can both be part of the same financial institution. I can just tell the bank to send money to him. And if our banks are not connected to their banks and they want to send money they can have a deeper banking layer making that more and more easy. 

Lyn: As that developed it made things very efficient but it also meant that they became very centralized, controlled, and very surveilable. So the power structure shifted from it was just inherently hard to block transactions or surveil transactions and as things became more digital as they became more centralized the burden of proof is almost the opposite now.

Lyn: If anyone wants financial privacy they’re kind of thought of as “Why do you need financial privacy?” The default has shifted towards ubiquitous surveillance and ubiquitous control. For example, central bankers when they talk about things like anonymous payments view it as inherently threatening when not that long ago that was the default and anything else would have been perceived as weird. 

Lyn: I think that the technology aspect and the inevitability of it isn’t necessarily discussed enough. What I think’s powerful in the current era is for the first time we have technologies that can make money more efficient and also more decentralized and hopefully more private over time as well. You know for a century and a half, really for several centuries, the whole history of banking was constantly more and more centralization.

Lyn: This is a major pivot point where it’s the first time you have truly credible ways to decentralize some of that stack that’s built up. Maybe not every part of it is everywhere, but some of the core things can certainly move more to the edges and be less censored, less surveilled, and less controlled. I think that’s a really powerful thing, and I do think that human rights groups around the world should lean into that and see the importance there.

Alex: In your book, you talk about the inevitability aspect. You run it back a hundred times: gold was not going to be what we used to transact in the digital space obviously. It was destined to lose. But that meant that as money evolved it was becoming more centralized. Then you note that with the invention of Bitcoin, things start to change and it’s kind of exciting how now as money evolves we might get more free as opposed to more controlled. I just thought that was a really interesting insight. 

The Three Epochs of money

Lyn: I think there are three epochs that you can think of in terms of the history of money if you want to break it down. The first was pre-telegraph. All information and matter is moving at roughly the same speed. You can’t really transport high-bandwidth information faster than humans could go with ships and horses. So that was the pre-telegraph era. 

Lyn: The telegraph was invented in the 1830s it didn’t really get widely deployed until the 1860s. That’s when it was going across the Atlantic Ocean it was going across continents starting to connect larger and larger parts of the world. It didn’t really cross the Pacific until the early 1900s. But then once we entered that era we were in a period where we had enough bandwidth to do transactions quickly over the speed of light but not settlements. We’ve been in this 150-year gap or so a little longer where you have fast transactions but not fast settlements. 

Lyn: The third epoch is basically 2009 which is for the first time we have credible ways to do fast settlements that are almost at the speed of light, almost as fast as the fastest transactions. During that middle epoch, you needed some of these centralized ledgers to develop. They were solving a problem but by solving a problem they also created problems. They also injected problems into the system. That control was not healthy. Now we have a new era I think. 

Alex: Farida, a lot of people here might not know about your story. Maybe you could educate us a little bit about Togo, about the history of your country, about colonialism in Africa, and about why the struggle for freedom and democracy in Togo was very much a monetary struggle. When I learned this from you I was really surprised and interested because this isn’t really taught in schools here. We don’t learn about, let’s say, the colonial Franc system. Maybe you could start with that, and then we can talk a little bit about why Bitcoin might start to challenge some of this. 

The struggle for Freedom in Togo

Farida Nabourema: Absolutely. The struggle for freedom in Togo has always been tied to money in one way or another. Initially, Togo was a German colony and after World War I, when Germany lost the war, the country was split into two. The western side was rallied to Ghana. The Gold Coast which became modern-day Ghana and the Eastern side is what we know as Togo today was placed under the French Administration. 

Farida: Right after World War II there was a huge sentiment for freedom all over Africa including Togo. An independence movement was born out of that struggle. Some of the leaders of that movement decided to focus entirely on fighting for Togo’s independence. One of them was Sylvanus Olympio whom the Togolese people see as the founding father of the nation. Interestingly, Sylvanus Olympio was arrested by the French administration not officially because of his struggle for independence but for possessing foreign currency. 

Farida: The French government created in 1946 a currency that it imposed on all its colonies all over Africa (fifteen of them at the time). That currency was the only currency that citizens from those countries were authorized to use. Sylvanus Olympio at a time used to work for Unilever group and he used to be paid in British pounds. He had a bank account in the Gold Coast which became Ghana. When he issued a check and the administrators found a check, he was arrested for possession of foreign currency. He was sent to jail and he was deprived of all his civic rights. He could neither run for office nor vote. 

Farida: Eventually, it was banned for all freedom fighters. Independence at the time to have access to certain services including education, and healthcare, but definitely not a bank account. They managed to raise money despite that to lead the struggle and Togo became independent. The first thing Olympio promised he would do when we became independent was to quit the CFA system. He put the Togolese Parliament, as the new president of Togo, he put the Togolese Parliament to enact a new law to create the Togolese Franc. 

Farida: Exactly a month after the parliament voted the law the soldiers from the French colonial administration went to his house and assassinated him. After assassinating him they went ahead and arrested all the dissidents, all the people who were members of the independence movement including my grandfather. Ever since we have been ruled by these soldiers. Étienne Eyadéma who killed Olympio ruled for 38 years and his son has been in power for 19 years. For us, the people of Togo by over 80% of our population we have only known that family in power. 

Farida: It became clear for us that it was important for the French administration to continue maintaining the colonial CFA system. Why? Because it’s offered them a lot of perks. The first one is that we were obliged to put all of our gold reserves in the Bank of France. All of those 14 Nations still have their gold reserves in the Bank of France. Our money is printed by the French government. We don’t have the flexibility like other central banks that can sometimes choose to adjust their monetary policies, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad ones, but they still have that liberty. We don’t have that. 

Farida: In addition, our currency used to be pegged to the French Franc then to the Euro. So we are obliged to convert our money to Euro before we can trade both for exports and imports so everything we sell outside of the country the French government makes a profit out of that. To guarantee the convertibility according to the policy of our currency we pay 15%. So literally anything we sell or anything we buy we lose 15% of that value. 

Alex: I mean it’s basically like a giant prison because they left political control to the local leader who ended up becoming a dictator, but they could claim “Hey, we gave political independence!” but they kept economic control. The currency that you speak of is totally worthless outside of Togo. It can’t even be used in other CFA countries. Each one, there’s 14 or 15 of them, each one’s not convertible.

Farida: Actually, there are two central banks that the French government created. There’s one for West Africa and one for central Africa. So the CFA Franc for West African nations, eight of them, are the same, and the one for Central African nations. 

Alex: But if you’re in Gabon and Senegal, it doesn’t even work. The point is at every point they try to extract a fee. If you happen to leave some CFA in your pocket and go to the United States, it’s worthless. Every time you want to go into the Euro when you leave the country they take a fee. 

Farida: Absolutely. 

Alex: What was really staggering for me to learn is that between 1945 and 1946 when the system was created and at the end of the 1990s, the currency was devalued against the French Franc by 99%. 

Farida: Actually 200%. 

Alex: Well meaning it lost 99% of its value. 

Farida: Initially yes.

Alex: Yeah meaning it basically got completely drained of its value. What that really means in human terms is all of the work that the people put in Togo to do things was stolen from them. All their labor was stolen from them. If you work and you put your time into a currency, the value of your labor – you expect it to hold some value. But over time, generations of people in countries like Togo, that was actually stolen from them. 

Alex: When we talk about the increasing centralization of money, we can see it has had you know tremendous harm in the CFA Zone today. There are 15 countries. Almost every single one of them is at the bottom of every single possible development index. Not a single one of them is democratic in any meaningful way. It’s a real tragedy.

Alex: Now tell us a little bit about about why you ended up having to use Bitcoin. And why you think Bitcoin actually might be a challenge to this kind of colonial system. That might be a big shock to some people in the audience who have kind of identified Bitcoin as this libertarian thing. And maybe not have thought about it as an anti-colonial type thing. 

Bitcoin Against Colonialism

Farida: When I started using Bitcoin initially it wasn’t a tool. It wasn’t seen for me as a tool that can help us fight monetary colonialism. It was a tool we needed to send money safely as activists fighting the regime. So I founded a movement called the Faure Must Go movement in 2011. I was still young, 20 at the time. It was a movement of young people who were determined to bring an end to the military regime in Togo.

Farida: Eventually, the movement grew and blew and we got to a point where we had hundreds of thousands of people protesting demanding change. We were in the street for months. At the height of those protests the governments was tracking all the leaders of the movement. I had to flee the country and many others as well. Many people were arrested simply because they sent money to the movement, either a donation via bank transfer or even a donation via Western Union for those in the diaspora. 

Alex: They were surveilling and monitoring the banking system.

Farida: Absolutely. So they were able to track who was giving us money and they went after them and jailed them. It became clear to us that we could no longer continue sending money the way we were used to. Even more, the diaspora that was supporting us a lot in the struggle was some of them were also afraid now of donating because they knew the government could track that. 

Farida: So Bitcoin became the only private source that we could fall on to be able to move money into the country completely anonymously without being exposed to the regime. In the course of that, the connection became clear. One of the main reasons why we are fighting this regime is the level of poverty and inequality that their corruption and mismanagement has brought upon us.

Farida: Their presence is even caused by the fact that an establishment needs them there, provide them with military equipment, and resources to continue oppressing us so it is clear that we have to to some extent suffocate the regime financially. To find an alternative to the existing colonial currency that was imposed on us. That’s when the political connection with Bitcoin was established and we understood it could be a tool we can use for our liberation. 

Alex: Yeah, it’s not like if the dictator of Togo got the ability to print his own currency for whatever reason that wouldn’t solve the problem. It would be equally as surveilled and it would probably be inflated a lot faster even than the French currency so you know something else is needed essentially.

Alex: This led you to create the Africa Bitcoin Conference which is now in its second year. It’s amazing if anyone’s been there it’s a great, great event. Let’s hear it for the Africa Bitcoin conference. Hopefully, you all can attend later this year for the third edition. What was the driving force that led you to become a user of Bitcoin to become an advocate for it? What was that moment like for you? 

Farida: I will say that initially I was a little afraid about discussing anything money with people because as an activist there is always this attempt from the regime to try to say that they are doing it for the money. And once they have the money they will be quiet. So activists in general tend to distance themselves from money conversation.

Farida: But then it got to a point where we realized that in the end what are we fighting for? We are fighting for political and economic oppression and inequality. We cannot have that conversation without money. So we have to bolden up, be willing to talk to our people about why the existing monetary system is preventing them by all means to build wealth or to even keep the little that they are making. 

Farida: Every year inflation happens, but in addition to that our currency also depreciates. They lose on each side. It became to some extent a mission to explain to to our people that we cannot win the ideological war without the monetary war. And Bitcoin is both money, and it’s also an ideology. It’s a philosophy you have to abide by. It’s not just about using a tool to move money safely or accumulating wealth. It is about establishing a system that does not devalue you as a human being. It is the first currency that we have that provides everybody the same equity.

Farida: Anybody who has Bitcoin in Togo, their Bitcoin will be worth the same thing as somebody who has Bitcoin in the United States. But someone who has a CFA in Togo is de facto cheated on by the system because whatever they want to buy, even in the equivalent rate in the Dollar, they have to pay a fee for it. We are penalized because we are born in specific spaces, so Bitcoin becomes that specific tool that gives us for the first time political, economic, and ideological equity.

Alex: When you started making this clear to me a few years ago, and I started doing some research I found this amazing quote from a Cameroonian economist. The translation is something like you know “Africa won’t be politically free unless it has monetary freedom.” I think your arguments are animating that today. Which is pretty amazing. I’m sure he would have really loved to see Bitcoin actually.

Alex: So Jack we’ve gone from the system that Lyn and Farida have talked about which is basically proprietary money controlled by a single point failure, controlled by regimes that often abuse the people. What is the big idea and implication of moving to open-source money that’s not controlled by a government or a corporation? How do you see that playing into the struggle for freedom? 

Jack Dorsey: By the way, if you haven’t been to Farida’s conference in Africa, it’s definitely worth going to. I went to the first one, and I will go back hopefully this year whenever you set the date. It’s worth the trip. It’s a long way for a lot of you, and I know a lot of you took a long way to show up here. But if you really want to feel the necessity of Bitcoin and where it can really impact people go to Africa, go to South America, go to Central America, and talk to the individuals and the entrepreneurs and the people working on open source. 

The importance of Open Source

Jack: That to me is the reason why open source. Because it increases the number of people who can participate purely. It’s not closed off. You don’t have to submit a résumé. You don’t have to go to a particular school. You can read some code; you can learn it. You can have a good idea that could be accepted and could change the course of how people use the money. For people who are able to get a chance to fix their own problems on the same level playing field that we have in the United States or that Western countries have. 

Jack: We’re all using the same system that’s completely open, that’s verifiable, that we don’t have to trust. We can actually read the code or we can learn how to read the code and we can again submit and even potentially make it to Bitcoin Core to change it. That’s a very powerful idea and for something as fundamental as money to be able to work on a money system on a financial system where you don’t have to get permission from Visa, Mastercard, or the banks who have shut activists down.

Jack: Not just activists but aren’t even letting half if not more of the population to even transact with them. That means they can’t even participate in the economy and the fact that Bitcoin exists they can participate in a global economy instantly with just a cell phone. Most have at least one degree of separation to access but then take it to the next level where they can actually contribute to the system and make it better for them to help them solve their own problems. It’s pretty powerful. 

Jack: There’s there’s no other; I don’t think there’s anything more fundamental, more consequential. Obviously, we all believe this, being able to fix the money and actually make it work for people who have been under these pretty Draconian regimes such as the CFA and what France is doing. Now Bitcoin truly is hope because you see an exit, you see a doorway. Not only that but you can help contribute to making it work for you which is incredible.

Alex: Jack, how can corporations, whether they’re public companies or simply they need to play by the rules in the West, how can they embrace Bitcoin’s open-source nature? How can they do this in a way where it can expand freedom for other people? Are there better ways to do it? Are there worse ways to do it? What would be your advice to other companies? There are a lot of CEOs and founders here. How can they contribute to Bitcoin as a sustainable freedom movement? 

Everyone who contributes Makes Everyone Else Better

Jack: The first question I would ask myself is, “Does this need to be a company?” I never wanted to run a company. I never wanted to create a company. I never wanted to be CEO. I was in the open-source world from day one. I have so much gratitude for open source. It’s the only reason I’m on this stage. It’s the only reason I can do what I can do, and I have the resources that I have to give back to it. I think the first question is does it need to be a company?

Jack: As we talked about yesterday, the most beautiful thing about Bitcoin is everyone who contributes to it makes everyone else who’s contributing to it better. It’s this amazing virtuous cycle, and there are not many systems that exist that have that property. I don’t know of any other ones in fact. But again like anything Jack Mallers does for Strike benefits me at Block and vice versa. Anyone who’s working in open-source, independent of a company and getting a grant the same is true.

Jack: And often they’re being paid in Bitcoin, and it’s like having equity in the thing that they’re building. But equity that is far far better than anything you would find on Wall Street. Again because it’s completely permissionless. Nothing on Wall Street, nothing having to do with that road to a company and to this exit that we all celebrate has that property of being permissionless. 

Jack: Once you choose to start a company, you’re choosing a very very particular path. When you choose to hire people you have one of two choices: you pay them with cash which can be a lot for people that you want that are great that you want to bring in, or you pay them with some revenue share or equity in the future. Once you go down the equity path you’re either being acquired or you’re going public.

Jack: Once you go public all along the way you have these incentives but as soon as you get public you have all these shareholders and all these short sellers and all these other random characters in the world that only care about one thing which is growth at all costs and margin. They care nothing about (most of them, some of them do) but nothing about your purpose. Some of them say they care about your purpose like environmentalism or ESG and it’s complete bullshit. Most of them don’t care about the purpose. They only care about you increasing your margin and increasing the value of the stock. 

Jack: That is valuable but it’s not why we’re here. It’s a trap. The only thing that I can figure out is how do we make our company hybrid. We have immense resources as a public company, and we have taken so much from open source. Every single company that exists today of immense value whether it be Google or Open AI or Meta or name them – all of them have taken from open source and very very few of them have given back to it. Certainly not enough.

Jack: Every single device in your pocket is built on open source. All of it has a tie back to Linux at some point. And how many of those companies have actually given back to Linux? Some of them have, again, but not most of them.

Jack: How do I build my company such that soon within a matter of years like 50% of our development if not more is actually also open source or as close as we can get to it as possible? Especially if we’re building for Bitcoin which demands it. It demands the don’t trust verify. It demands the fact the only way that these things are going to be trusted is to be open, is to be transparent, and is to give the code away. 

Jack: Again, anyone who has a better idea than us and all of our bureaucracy and bigness as a company it’s going to benefit us in the long term. If they’re building for Bitcoin and they’re trying to make it truly better and make it more accessible to more people around the world it’s going to benefit our company and vice versa. Anything that we can amplify that model with which Bitcoin provides us this amazing canvas for, we’re down for. 

Alex: Woo! So basically it’s a great start to build on Bitcoin or Nostr or any open protocol but you should think about giving back to that protocol however you can and that will ensure that this freedom movement is sustainable in the future. And it’s very powerful.

Alex: I mean look Bitcoin is doing it’s funny because there’s this apprehension among most people that even on Wall Street even people who want to maybe get ETF or whatever the they’re still a little worried about Bitcoin because they think it’s for bad people or it’s dirty or it’s bad for the planet or whatever. This apprehension that’s been created by 15 years of narrative by governments and media that it is bad for people on the planet. Some of us know here that the total opposite is true. 

The Unit of Account in Egypt

Alex: There isn’t a better social impact investment you could possibly make than Bitcoin. It’s out there today helping tens of millions of people in places that no aid organization could ever reach. Part of the reason why that’s so hard to understand for people is they never encounter specific examples of why money is actually a tool of repression often.

Alex: Lyn, you’ve been pretty instrumental I think for a lot of people in giving real-world examples of the right things that you’ve seen. For example, maybe you could talk about a country like Egypt. What’s going on there? You’ve written some about that. Maybe talk to people about what it’s like today for people in a country like Egypt that’s suffering from both foreign pressure to modify the currency and internal pressure. What is it like for someone’s just daily life there? 

Lyn: Sure and for people that don’t know I spend part of each year in Egypt. I live a minority of each year there, and I know a lot of friends and family there. It’s been super instrumental seeing how money works in those types of environments. As someone who studies economics I know the quantitative data of how currencies work in a lot of developing countries, but there’s no substitute for being on the ground year after year after year, seeing how it changes over time, asking people how they deal with it.

Lyn: So when we think of how currencies work today there are 160 currencies in the world more or less and when we think of most things we don’t think monopolies are good but they all have monopolies over their jurisdictions. They enforce those monopolies by controlling the two main ways to get money in or out one is ports of entry. Obviously, they’re very restricted, very limited and the other one is bank wires which are also very they’re surveilled, they’re controllable. So in those environments that they can enforce on the people they’re stuck with one constantly devaluing currency. 

Lyn: I guess the biggest lesson I learned in Egypt is it’s not even just about the savings. It’s also about the unit of account. For example, it’s very obvious to say that if you want to store your past work, inflating savings is a bad thing. When the currency loses its value that’s obviously a bad thing for people that are holding it. The other aspect of it is the unit of account. For example in Egypt, and many other countries like it, the money supply increases by an average of about 20% a year.

Lyn: That’s what their wages are denominated in. If you have resources, if you’re wealthy, if you’re well connected, if you have access to global finance, you can arbitrage this kind of thing. You can short the currency that other people are saving their value in. You take out debt in it. You’re shorting it to buy something else. You’re buying foreign currency. You’re buying harder assets whereas those people are earning what is now basically increasing in supply at a rapid rate. 

Lyn: It puts them on a constant treadmill. Every single year if you’re in this country and you didn’t get a 20% raise in your wages, you’re getting diluted. Your share of the network is getting diluted. If you’re a small business and you’re not raising your prices, and you feel bad about raising prices because you know your customers but if you’re not doing it then you’re getting diluted from the system.

Lyn: If you’re a landlord and you’re you just own a spare apartment and you’re renting it out, if you’re not constantly increasing your prices all the time for your rent you’re getting diluted as a share of the network. It kind of shifts the burden of effort from the status quo. 

Lyn: If you have sound money and you make wages the status quo is on your employer trying to change it. You’re coasting on the wage that is, but if money’s always inflating away the burden of effort is always on the least powerful to try to just maintain their share of the network over time. I think the biggest lesson I got from that is seeing that it’s not just the savings it’s also the unit of account and the constant treadmill that it puts people on.

Lyn: Every country is at a different speed. In the United States money supply goes up an average 7% a year. People are on a 7% annual treadmill. If you’re not constantly increasing your savings and your wages by that amount, you’re getting your share of the network is diminishing, and going to someone else.

Lyn: If you’re in many countries around the world it’s double digits. In some of the worst cases, it’s triple digits or outright hyperinflation. Even in those middle environments just the fact that you are high single digits or low double digits and that burden of effort just compounds every single year. The effort is always on the people that have the least resources to deal with it. 

Currency Devaluations – Crimes against Humanity

Alex: It’s interesting because oftentimes the financial media uses euphemisms to talk about monetary phenomena that hurt a lot of people. They’ll use this term structural adjustment right to describe you know what typically is in the back pages of the FTO. “This country is undergoing a structural adjustment.” You’re like “oh okay.” But what that actually means is usually number one a massive currency devaluation, and those people aren’t getting a raise in the corresponding percentage. 

Alex: I was so struck by this when I visited Malawi a few months ago with a few of the people here at this event. We arrived about 6 weeks after a 44% currency devaluation. This was a decision undertaken by the government in consultation with the IMF and a few other IFIs. This is a country where people don’t have easy access to Dollar markets like Argentina for example.

Alex: People save in the paper currency, the Kwacha, and that’s about it. They don’t have any sort of access to any kind of other savings instrument that can really protect them. They’re already some of the poorest people in the world. It’s the sixth poorest country in the world. People make about anywhere from $300 to $600 a year. In this country, and obviously that’s a median, in the city they may make a couple thousand and in the remote countryside they may make less than $100 a year. They don’t need a 44% currency devaluation. They don’t need for overnight their purchasing power to be only 56% of what it was the day before. 

Alex: Seeing this was super heartbreaking and it really crystallized for me this idea that currency devaluation is a crime against humanity. Literally, if you were going to design a weapon to hurt everybody in a country what could be more precise than destroying every single person’s purchasing power? Obviously, some people as Lyn was saying can get out of it because they’re privileged. We’ve seen this everywhere. I have friends who tell me that in Venezuela when the currency was collapsing wealthier people would borrow in Bolivars and then buy a condo in Miami. Then watch the loan go to zero, but the average person can’t do that.

Alex: This is something that has traumatized a lot of people, and there’s really been no way out. Farida, you’ve obviously seen this firsthand. What are the challenges for you as you interact with different movements in Africa and West Africa and different parts of the world? How do you try to educate people about this? I know that you think that this can be a powerful tool for them, but what are the obstacles in helping people understand that Bitcoin is a tool for freedom? 

Farida: Interestingly the conversation that I have had with movements, leaders, activists, and freedom fighters across the continent when I break down the linkages between the ongoing political crisis almost every country is facing and the existing monetary system that we all are obliged to abide by, it becomes natural for them that Bitcoin is a solution.

Farida: I have never seen anybody resist the idea of Bitcoin being able to solve that particular problem. The skepticism usually comes from a lack of understanding of the data and a lack of information. The information is also kept for a specific purpose because there are institutions that have gained from this existing model. 

Farida: In Africa, we have 46 currencies. That’s 46 central banks. The CFA countries normally have a model that should be a positive one if the money was being kept by the citizens and if we had functioning and real democratic governments. But it’s not the case. The problem that we have is that our nations borrow in foreign currencies for most countries up to 60% of their external debt is in dollars.

Farida: Whenever the dollar rises, the interest rates rises and the Dollar rises, our currencies lose their value automatically as related to the dollar. We now need more money to pay back our debt and of course, these are nations where people are producing very little. A lot of the money that was borrowed was used by politicians, was stolen by politicians and government officials and invested in projects that didn’t really yield any benefits. As a result, the citizens are forced to pay back loans that didn’t benefit them at a higher rate. 

Farida: The consequence is that taxes are automatically increased. Social services that were already very low are completely cut off as part of that structural adjustment system. What I tell people is very simple. We complain that we lack the very basic amenities in hospitals. In my country Togo, women in the public hospital deliver their babies on the floor. We don’t even have beds in the public hospital. But why? Because at some point our government owed so much money that our debt was bought by the IMF through the structural adjustment program and the social services were slashed off completely from the state budget. 

Farida: For countries where very little was already been given to the citizen more is taken from them to fill the gap for an existing monetary system that is not providing them any advantage. In the end, people work more, and they earn less. Because the money they earn can only buy them very little. In addition to that, they have to pay more taxes to be able to reimburse the debt, and all the little services the government can provide – clean water, sanitation, hospital, education – are entirely removed.

Farida: When people see the picture of course they feel cheated, of course they feel abused, and they want a different solution. In the past it has always been “what do we do? Do we create our own currencies?” But in the end the countries that also have their own currencies are also going through similar situations. The solution is to have a currency that is no longer manipulated by institutions, that is entirely accessible to the world where people can steadily start building wealth and also prevent their purchasing power from being halved by the existing monetary system. 

Alex: We’re going to hear a lot in the next hour or two about individual micro cases of how Bitcoin helps people/individuals. This is not disputable. This is happening around the world at scale, and it’s great. If Bitcoin just helps I think that’s something really to be very excited about. But I think it also has bigger potential to actually address some of the structural issues in the world. Maybe this was inevitable due to markets, politics, and technology. 

Alex: Maybe we were always going to have one dominant currency. People prefer one currency for ease of business like they prefer maybe the English language. Whether or not that was intentional it has created a very unequal world where 4% of the world’s population gets to determine the rules for everyone else. Some unelected group of people you know in Washington get to decide the cost of capital for people all across Africa. Even though they’ve never even heard of these people or they’re not relevant at all to their life.

Alex: I think in one way we can all understand how the old system the legacy fiat system is very primitive in many ways. When you send a bank wire then you send Bitcoin you realize how superior Bitcoin is. I think we might even start considering how archaic the existing system is at the global scale. Maybe a hundred years from now people will look back and say how crazy was it that that one country issued and controlled the currency for everybody else. I think that’s such a powerful vision. 

Alex: Jack, it’s going to require constant work to get there, right? To maybe see that world. Some of us think that “Hey you know as long as governments keep censoring and devaluing and inflating Bitcoin will be valuable” but there are risks to Bitcoin. There are risks to its decentralization. There are ways for it to go wrong. How are you looking at trying to address some of those vulnerabilities today? Whether through donations or investment. What are some of the vulnerabilities you see and what are some of the kind of cooler ideas you’ve seen about how to address those right now? Obviously, mining being one area you might want to comment on, but just in general. 

Paving the way for Bitcoin

Jack: Well I mean we put a lot of emphasis on the governments, but it’s also the corporations too. I mean it is the financial institutions and the banks and just the control they have and the lobbying power they have over the government. I think that is just as much a single point of failure as as anything else. How do we address that? 

Jack: First, even if we have a business in a legacy financial system, we invest in the future, and the future is Bitcoin. Invest in the future as it being our go forward financial system that we can build our products for like. When we started Square it was super unfortunate when in comparison to Twitter because we could not be an internet company. We couldn’t release an app or a website and anyone who could find it could use it.

Jack: We had to go market by market relationship with a bank to relationship with a bank, different regulatory [requirements]. It’s super, super slow to expand so just for our business. The fact that we can’t truly be an internet company because we don’t have an open protocol for money movement is really bad for our business. And it really hurts our adoption. 

Jack: The fact that we can invest in something that will allow us to be more like an internet company, that we can open up Cash App in every single market, that there is an app store or anyone who can access a website, our point of sale tools for the seller, everything that we do wants to be more global, but we’re super constrained because these banking relationships and these gatekeepers that we that we have to go through. So my biggest issue is not not the government right now it’s it’s the other corporations that are tying up the financial activity. That’s one counter. 

Jack: Another is to be a company or an individual that is giving back to open source and giving it without strings. OpenSats is a great organization that is completely denominated in Bitcoin they’re fully pass through. I can donate money to them, they instantly convert it to bitcoin, and they pay their grant recipients in bitcoin. They go through this incredible vetting process to go and vet both Bitcoiners and Bitcoin developers but also folks that are now working on Nostr.

Jack: On the Bitcoin side, I think the biggest thing that I heard when I talked with developers who weren’t at companies but wanted to work on Bitcoin or Nostr is “I need more of a long-term view on this. I can’t just take a little grant and then spend all my time searching for the next grant. I have a family. I need to feed them. I need a year, two years, or three years.” 

Jack: Now a lot of these organizations like OpenSats and Brink are doing long-term grants as you would expect joining a company and getting a long-term four-year vesting equity grant. Now you don’t have to go to the company; you can actually work on what you want to work on. You still have this long-term view. We all know, any developer in this room. It’s very hard to do anything meaningful in under a year. It takes years to do something that really lasts and it’s really important that we have more.

Jack: We’re pretty dependent upon just a few of these grant organizations. HRF is obviously another one. We need more of these, we need a lot more we need more diversity because we don’t want to be in a situation where any of these entities whether it be OpenSats, HRF, or me can push an agenda that we might have and actually start having strings into the grant process. It needs to be up to the developer. We like what they’re doing, and we’re pushing it, but another potential central point of failure is how Bitcoin developers get their money and Nostr developers get their money. 

Jack: If we want more and more people to choose the open source path and not have to go to a company, we got to have more diversity within the funding sort. There’s a bunch of people who made a lot of money on Bitcoin and Bitcoin companies that hopefully should be giving more to the ecosystem and should have some sort of percentage whether that be personal or as a company so that everything that they benefit from and all the money they’ve made is actually reflected in in the work that people are doing to make it even better. 

Concluding Thoughts

Alex: We’re going to wrap up here with a few concluding thoughts. If you all like this kind of conversation please stick around there’s going to be some amazing activists and educators coming up here. Jack will be back later with folks from Btrust to talk about that initiative so please stick around. If you’re in the area, if you’re in Europe, and you like this content, join us at the Oslo Freedom Forum in June. We’re all going to be there. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Check that out. Yeah, let’s go Oslo Freedom Forum. 

Alex: To my colleagues at HRF who’ve designed a really great educational resource if you want to learn about what’s happening in this area of financial repression, what’s happening with currency devaluations, what’s happening with Bitcoin development, it’s a newsletter that comes out every Thursday called the Financial Freedom Report. It’s really excellent and you can check that out by looking at hrf.org/financialfreedomreport. Check out that newsletter; my team does an amazing job on that. With that, one last final thought from each of you about how this thing can continue to empower people. What advice do you have for folks who want to get engaged and help Bitcoin remain a tool of freedom?  

Lyn: I think Bitcoin as open-source money is choice. It introduces choice into environments that historically have not had choice. They’ve been in this monopoly control. They go around the ports of entry. They go around the banks. They go peer-to-peer. They go across the borders.

Lyn: Anything that you can do to add to Bitcoin any way: how to make it more private, how to make it more scalable, how to make it more trust minimized, how to make the UX better, how to educate others around it. Any small part that people can play like Jack said that someone adds to it strengthens everyone else. That’s a very virtuous cycle so I know everybody here has talents that they can add to the network. 

Farida: It’s actually incredible to see how Bitcoin connects us one way or another from every part of the world. Our stories are very relatable because we are facing challenges in every single sector that Bitcoin solves one way or another. I have seen it work especially in Africa with amazing projects like Gridless for example bringing electricity to people through Bitcoin mining communities that have never had electricity for decades. Projects like Btrust are training developers on the continent to solve issues we have always had with money. Bitcoin is giving us a new start and a chance for us in the world to free ourselves from oppression. 

Jack: I think the biggest thing you can do is ask a question of an activist. Just start learning and asking questions and being curious. You’re going to have a bunch of them come up on stage next. Just take some time and ask questions it doesn’t have to be in person it can be online through X or Nostr. Just reach out and ask questions and learn because it’ll change your thinking and no matter what it’s going to make your thinking a lot better. 

Alex: Thank you all for being here. It means a lot to us. We’ll see you around.

Other talks by Alex Gladstein at Bitlyrics here

Another panel featuring Lyn Alden at Bitlyrics here

Another panel featuring Jack Dorsey at Bitlyrics here

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