Thread by @gladstein

1/ Honored to be cited by SEC Commissioner @HesterPeirce in her latest remarks on Bitcoin, human rights, and regulation.

This 🧵summarizes her thesis, inspired by the work of abolitionists, about why the US should be open, not closed, to liberation tech:

sec.gov/news/speech/pe…

2/ “Harriet Tubman will soon grace our $20 bill… She brought herself and many other enslaved Americans to freedom through a remarkable combination of intelligence, courage, faith, boldness, diverse expertise, fearlessness, experience, strength, resilience, and cooperation”

3/ “These traits and experiences equipped her to serve in the Civil War as a scout, nurse, cook, and military expedition leader. Tubman’s commitment to liberty was not abstract, but personal and life-changing to each of the individuals whom she led on a grueling march to freedom”

4/ “It is going to be wonderful to have Harriet Tubman’s likeness on our paper money. Individual liberty, something to which she was so deeply committed, also is being memorialized in non-sovereign money.”

5/ “Tubman died almost a hundred years before Bitcoin’s birth, but had crypto been around when she was alive, could it have benefited her and others in similar life- and liberty-threatening situations?”

6/ “Getting money quickly was often a matter of life or death for the people whom Tubman was trying to save or support. Moving money around was difficult, expensive, and risky. Tubman was often traveling—back to the Eastern Shore of Maryland to liberate more people...”

7/ “to Canada to visit family and friends she had helped to freedom, around the Northeast to raise money to fund living expenses, future trips, and humanitarian relief efforts, or to the South to work for the Union Army.”

8/ “People, some overseas, sent money to friends they thought she was going to visit on these travels. There were delays/risks associated with transmitting money in the 19th century, including the money not reaching its intended recipient because it was lost/stolen along the way”

9/ “Getting money to her family and friends back in Maryland was probably difficult, impossible, or illegal. Carrying a lot of money around was risky.”

10/ “A peer-to-peer tool that enabled easy-to-store money to reach people almost instantaneously where they were, without having to pass through the hands of an untrustworthy or expensive intermediary could have been helpful.”

11/ “It's common to hear govt officials worry about crypto use by criminals, even though numbers suggest that it is used for illicit purposes less often than cash is. Perhaps officials should pause to consider the flip side... its value in protecting people from illicit activity”

12/ “Because of its ability to reach people without intermediaries and its ease of storage, transport, and access, crypto can be an important part of the survival story of people living under the threat of harm by their families, people in their communities, or repressive govts”

13/ “The disproportionate focus on illicit uses and the underestimation of the protective uses of crypto is one example of how evidence-based rulemaking is not yet the norm in crypto-regulation. We can do better, and I hope that this year will mark a turning point for the US...”

14/ “which in turn may spur other countries similarly to take a more sensible approach to crypto regulation. The role of government should be to serve people, not to surveil and curtail people’s everyday activities. Of course, government has an important role in setting...”

15/ “regulatory guardrails to ensure that people do not harm one another, but these guardrails should support people’s ability to exercise their liberty in a way that serves them, their families, and their communities.”

16/ “To the extent crypto and decentralizing technologies allow people to do these things without harming others, we as regulators should work so that they have the freedom to experiment with these technologies.”

Amen.