Human Rights Foundation chief strategy officer Alex Gladstein says Bitcoin stands for free speech, property rights and open capital markets — limiting the power of tyrannical regimes.
Bitcoin fixes broken democracies and fights government corruption by reducing its power to control its own people, argues Bitcoin advocate and chief strategy officer of the Human Rights Foundation, Alex Gladstein.
In a Feb. 28 interview. 16. 20, Gladstein says the decentralized nature of Bitcoin
BTC called BTC
trees are down
$23,596 in cash
it can be a bulwark against corruption and tyranny.
“When democracies have broken down, I think they fit very well with fiat currencies, and I think Bitcoin addresses this in a way,” he said.
Gladstein is HRF’s chief strategy officer and has worked for the nonprofit since 2007. The foundation focuses on promoting and protecting human rights around the world — especially in countries whose people live “under control of authority.”
Gladstein also lectures on Bitcoin and the future of money at Singularity University events, according to his bio.
Gladstein said during the interview that Bitcoin represents freedom of speech, property rights and open capital markets, all of which stifle a tyrannical regime, which often seeks censorship, expropriation and the lockdown of capital grocery. He said:
“This is what China and Russia need to survive they need intelligence, they need peripheral capital markets and they need expropriation; Bitcoin makes it very difficult for governments to enforce those things on their people.”
Both Russia and China have been hostile to crypto in the past. The Chinese government has banned almost all crypto trading by 2021. However, the upcoming crypto licensing regime in Hong Kong has led to speculation that China’s stance on crypto is softening.
Russia’s main crypto law, “On Digital Financial Assets,” officially banned the use of crypto for payments by 2020. The law did not prohibit Russia from investing in crypto, but local crypto exchanges remained unregulated.
“I don’t see these dictatorial forces doing well in the Bitcoin standard; I think it’s really hard for them,” Gladstein added.
Gladstein’s comments on crypto echoed similar sentiments from others in the past. Bitcoin infrastructure provider OpenNode expressed similar sentiments in a 2021 post about the impact of BTC contributions on avoiding sovereign suppression.
“One of the advantages of Bitcoin is its anonymity,” OpenNode wrote at the time.
“Without any central authority to dictate who can and cannot use Bitcoin, it has proven to be the currency of many people and organizations left out of traditional channels in which we will pay.
According to a February 2022 survey by blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, one of the main reasons for adopting blockchain-based fundraising is to avoid financial institutions closing traditional accounts.
Related: Blockchain is the only effective privacy and anti-censorship mechanism in the 21st century
Gladstein predicts that there will be many more “challenging opportunities” in the coming years for people who have “technical and financial difficulties with traditional financial services,” enabling people to switch to BTC as an alternative.
“If there’s a conflict or a breakdown in a transaction or communication, you’re just going to see a whole hell of a lot of problems, and each of them is about the amount you’d mint a new Bitcoiner on demand, ” he said.
