Thread by @gladstein

1/ Two years ago I wrote "In China, it's Blockchain and Tyranny vs Bitcoin and Freedom"

It's just as true today, where the CCP's digital currency project is designed for maximum control, while the regime demonstrates an increasing fear of Bitcoin

🇨🇳 🧵

bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/op-ed-…

2/ Any progress on the digital yuan surveillance and control coin will be a disaster for civil liberties.

But it is hard to imagine that Xi Jinping can push public digital currency education for hundreds of millions without more and more of them eventually learning about BTC.

3/ It is one thing to censor the internet, but another thing entirely to keep people away from a well-performing financial asset with no barrier for entry.

Governments can keep people off the open web, but it will be a lot harder to keep people off of Bitcoin.

4/ In “The Matrix,” the protagonist Neo is given a choice by Morpheus to take the blue pill and stay in his known world of comfort and safety, or take the red pill and risk going down the rabbit hole.

The digital yuan is the blue pill.

5/ And there are many people who are fine with the blue pill — perhaps even a large majority — who are happy to comply with the rules and who don’t want to risk their comfortable, convenient situation by doing anything that could put their status quo in jeopardy.

6/ But there are also plenty of Neos in the world who will risk taking Bitcoin’s red pill, especially when it is uncensorable, hard to track, able to teleport around the world in seconds, and, most critically, increasing in price over time against a yuan whose value may struggle.

7/ The CCP originally wanted to ride the “blockchain” hype cycle and use it as lipstick for a panoptical pig.

And they may succeed, at least in the short term.

We should have no doubts about their intentions or capabilities.

8/ The only silver lining is that ultimately, the digital yuan as a popularizer of digital currencies may end up being one big Trojan Horse for Bitcoin, where Satoshi Nakamoto — not Xi Jinping — gets the last laugh.

Here's the full essay:

bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/op-ed-…