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.

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More from @gladstein

8 Mar
1/ The Aker shareholder letter from Kjell Inge Røkke is remarkable.

Having worked in Norway since 2008, IMO this is a major step towards more Scandinavian Bitcoin discussion + adoption.

Here's a 🧵 on the letter's unexpected highlights especially regarding Lightning + privacy:
2/ Aker is a 180-year-old Norwegian corporation now launching Seetee, a Bitcoin company:

"We will use bitcoin as our treasury asset and join the community. We will be hodlers. Perhaps not as rebellious as the cypherpunks... But more progressive than most established corporates"
3/ A recurring theme in Røkke's letter is an interest in privacy.

Early on:

"I am particularly interested in micropayments and how these may enable us to avoid usernames, passwords, and our personal data being monetised with, and often without, our knowledge or consent”
Read 14 tweets
8 Mar
1/ Many might think that extreme inflation is a rare occurrence in today's modern world.

That's simply not the case.

There are 1.2 billion people currently living in countries experiencing double or triple digit inflation.

🧵
2/ Countries with inflation ranging from 10% - 20%:

-Haiti (11M)
-Nigeria (205M)
-Turkey (84M)
-Sierra Leone (8M)
-Uzbekistan (33M)
-Guinea (13M)
-Liberia (5M)
-Pakistan (223M)
-Kyrgyzstan (7M)
-Ghana (31M)
-Tajikistan (10M)
3/ Countries with inflation north of 20%:

-Ethiopia (116M)
-Zambia (18M)
-Libya (7M)
-Congo (90M)
-Angola (32M)
-Yemen (30M)
-South Sudan (12M)
-Argentina (45M)
-North Korea (25M)
-Cuba (11M)
Read 6 tweets
27 Feb
1/ There are a couple things that make Bitcoin different from any previous top dog in the money hierarchy, which will create a different financial system than the one we've seen before, which Brendan describes here.
2/ Anyone can verify their Bitcoin holdings or the global monetary supply from cheap equipment at home. So, unlike gold, citizens and institutions can easily custody their BTC w/o relying on third parties. This creates a stronger demand for actual BTC versus promises to pay.
3/ Also unlike gold, there is a liquid 24/7 global market for Bitcoin accessible to anyone with an internet connection where you can sell BTC or buy BTC + withdraw quickly into self-custody. With vibrant global p2p markets, you don't have to deal with slow, regulated gatekeepers.
Read 12 tweets
21 Dec 20
@felixsalmon 1/ I do. I’ll give you a few now. For starters BYSOL, a grassroots Belarusian human rights org, has moved more than $500k of value peer-to-peer to striking workers inside Belarus, in a way the regime can’t stop. Activists or protestors normally get their bank accounts frozen.
@felixsalmon 2/ A Nigerian feminist coalition raised tens of thousands of dollars in Bitcoin via @BtcpayServer to support pro-democracy anti-SARS protests in October while their bank accounts were being turned on and off. @jack even shared helping the movement go even more viral
@felixsalmon @BtcpayServer @jack 3/ Many organizations in Hong Kong have had their bank accounts investigated or funds for supporting human rights work. The indispensable @hkfp team ran into this issue and the local Bitcoin community helped them set up @BtcpayServer so now they can raise funds without that worry
Read 18 tweets
15 Apr 20
Thread on the folly of fighting COVID-19 w/ surveillance:

1/ Is there an independent study showing that digital contact tracing has, all things equal, been a big help? As opposed to masks, hand washing, testing, social distancing, public education, healthcare per capita, etc?
2/ Is it demonstrably clear that cell phone tracking can be reliable + effective in urban areas where the virus hits the hardest? Singapore's spy tactics seem to be failing. How to prevent false positives w/o the panopticon of cross-referencing location data/CCTV data/comms data?
3/ We must also grapple with the fact that the government that has the most intense citizen surveillance system in history (the Chinese Communist Party) couldn't, despite all the Orwellian tech in the world, prevent an outbreak, mass loss of life, and economic devastation.
Read 12 tweets
27 Nov 19
1/ I just finished reading The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver. It is probably the single greatest work of recent fiction that helps you understand why we need Bitcoin and decentralized, private money. What’s more it’s hilarious, readable, and makes for an excellent holiday gift.
2/ The book’s plot centers around the collapse of the US dollar in 2029 America. The story is told through the eyes of different members of the Mandible family. Like young Willing here who, after watching police conduct a gold raid on his home, explains hyperinflation to his Mom.
3/ Later in the book, we learn that the US government has completely eliminated cash by 2042. The same character Willing here wonders why it took so long for the government to ban it in the first place.
Read 9 tweets

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