Excerpt
I discuss how Bitcoin serves as the embodiment of human rights, particularly focusing on the human rights towards privacy and the presumption of innocence. I explain the challenges posed by current financial systems and regulations, and how Bitcoin provides a unique solution. Join me to explore why Bitcoin is essential for protecting our freedoms in today’s world.
Transcript
Bitcoin and Human Rights
30 articles in the United Nations human rights list and I identified that for 11 of those Bitcoin can be a tool that enforces it or supports that human right.
We were just speaking about the right to privacy, which is an article in the human rights convention list, and also there is the presumption of innocence. I want to talk about the presumption of innocence as a human right and how we don’t have that anymore in today’s world, together with the fact that we don’t have any privacy anymore because the goal of every government in the world seems to be to have a complete picture of all we do.
With all the KYC regulation and the anti-money laundering rules and regulations, it’s now the time that we, as people who want to use some form of money or some form of financial account and even Bitcoin, need to identify ourselves upfront. So basically, we’re not innocent anymore. We have to give them our identity so that we can prove our innocence all the time. It’s not anymore that they go for the criminals who might do some illegal stuff before they use money or after they’ve used it and have to prove that they made something illegal.
No, now it’s us who have to prove ourselves upfront.
Tornado Cash Case
And also recently, there was this court case in the Netherlands last week where the software developer of Tornado Cash has been convicted to more than five years of imprisonment. One of the explainers of the judge why that happened was that they said that the developer basically made some decisions to work on that code and the knowledge that maybe also people who are doing illegal things can use or will use his software.
So basically, it’s like a knife manufacturer, for instance, is selling a knife and someone is killing someone with that knife. I never heard that a knife manufacturer or a gun manufacturer was imprisoned because they also know that someone can kill someone with it.
Freedom of Speech and Association
This is very, very worrying to me because it also takes the freedom of speech from us, which then takes freedom of association because if I can’t express my will or my opinions through money – because if I donate to a cause I express my opinion – and if I can’t express my opinion with money, I can also not associate and get together with others to demonstrate or protest against something that’s unjust or against police brutality, like it happened in Nigeria where Bitcoin was then really used.
With BTC Pay Server, the Feminist Coalition was able to receive donations from abroad again to support the protests against police brutality after the fact that when they first started using the banking system, the Central Bank immediately shut their banking account. They remembered something like Bitcoin and set up their own BTC Pay Server.
Freedom of Movement
Bitcoin enforces a lot of human rights, also like freedom of movement. You said Bitcoin is superior to real estate. I agree for me because with Bitcoin I’m very mobile. You can take your Bitcoin anywhere and you only need to remember 12 words if it’s hard on hard and you need to move fast because maybe there’s a war or some sort of catastrophe in your country and you need to leave.
Bitcoin is really, how shall I say, it’s the backbone or the embodiment of human rights. You can’t do that with any other cryptocurrency because all those other cryptocurrencies are in a way centralized; they can be shut down. Only Bitcoin can’t be, and so it’s our only defense tool actually.
Privacy and Government
Regarding privacy, yes, we need more privacy on-chain. We need more possibilities to hide our traces, and this is not because we want to hide something from our society and from the government in that sense. I mean, I see the government and authorities in my country as they are here to the service of the people, not the other way around.
If they do a good service to my country and to my living standards, then I pay taxes. I can also pay them in Bitcoin, but I don’t see why I need to pay a capital gains tax and a tax on my income with the same currency, which you have to do now in Austria, for instance. So, there’s a lot to be said about that.
Trust in Bitcoin
Like Yuval Harari, the author, recently said, Bitcoin shows basically, in my words, I would say, it shows that people have lost trust in their governments, which is actually true. But it gives us hope and we don’t need to trust the Bitcoin system because it has its own rules and no human interaction can change them to their own good. That’s the great thing about Bitcoin and I think it’s something that so many people still can’t grasp.
Fear of Bitcoin
I know that a lot of people are also very scared. Interestingly enough, if I talk to people about Bitcoin in Europe, most people, the first thing they say is, it scares me. I don’t know how it works, that’s the first thing. And the next thing is, what happens to our society, to our societal contract?
People are afraid of the new. They justify the system that they have at the moment because they have arranged themselves with it.
Bitcoin is Punk
I think people who are already in Bitcoin, in self-custody Bitcoin, are those who, like Andreas Antonopoulos once said, Bitcoin is punk. So we are still the punks, it’s still very early. I hope that people more and more realize that Bitcoin is for anyone and it doesn’t favor the crypto bros. The crypto bros are in shitcoins, in shitcoin land, and that’s something different than Bitcoin from my perspective.
