Though the protest was recently quelled by Canadian police, the Freedom Convoy was a thorn in the side of Trudeau’s tyranny. Trudeau labeled the truckers a “fringe minority” while citizens across the globe waved the Canadian flag in-step with the truckers cause—standing against medical tyranny in the form of vaccine mandates. Trudeau enacted emergency powers to trample on the civil liberties of the truckers.
Millions of dollars poured into the Freedom Convoy despite being labeled a minority. A GoFundMe campaign for the truckers had over 10 million in donations at one point, but the donation platform eventually caved to Trudeau’s demands and froze the donations. GoFundMe meant to disperse the ceased donations to other campaigns at first, but due to public outrage the site will now refund all donors. Rightly so.
Efforts have been made to circumvent Trudeau’s cash-grabbing. GiveSendGo, a Christian donation platform, accumulated over $600,000 of donations for the truckers. Canadian citizens showed up at the protest with supplies, money, and food to support the truckers before being hauled away by police. Many crypto donations were sent to the convoy—almost 1 million USD in Bitcoin—and despite Trudeau freezing fiat-off ramps many of the donations still made it to the truckers.
Trudeau’s tyrannical measures (and the spineless companies like GoFundMe) display the use case of Bitcoin and other decentralized cryptocurrencies—that is, citizen’s retaining financial sovereignty.
The Canadian government asked Nunchuk.io, a Bitcoin custodial wallet, to “freeze” Bitcoins that may be going to the truckers. Nunchuk.io replied with, “We do not collect any user identification beyond email addresses. We also do not hold any keys. Therefore: We cannot “freeze” our users’ assets. We cannot “prevent” them from being moved. We don not have knowledge of “the existence, nature, value and location” of our users’ assets. This is by design. Please look up how self custody and private keys work. When the Canadian dollar becomes worthless, we will be here to serve you, too.“
A tweet sceenshoting the correspondense went viral:
The Ontario Superior Court of Justice asked self-custody wallet provider @nunchuk_io to disclose user information and freeze user’s bitcoin.
— Pomp 🌪 (@APompliano) February 19, 2022
This was the team’s response. pic.twitter.com/uyW9OWs1LS
Nunchuk.io isn’t able to “freeze” any of the trucker’s Bitcoin because the software only provides the digital wallets that host the currency. In fact, if Bitcoin is stored in a digital wallet owned solely by a person and not an exchange, no other entity can move the funds besides the owner (unless another party knows the “seed phrase” to the digital wallet).
Tyrannical measures sprung from the never-ending COVID displays the present need for blockchain technology. Bitcoin is a decentralized, inflation-proof, and immutable way to transport value among parties. It is not controlled by a centralized power like fiat money is.
Value is needed to make change and influence the outcomes of governing bodies or public policy makers. Governing bodies can make promises they are “for the people” or “committed to democracy” but that’s not guaranteed when value is centralized under the power of those making promises. A citizen-body must rely on trust—the claims of a government—when that is the case.
We’ve seen that trust doesn’t hold much water as of late. There may have been a time when trusting one’s government was rational. That time is gone.
However, if value is decentralized and under the sovereignty of a collective body of citizens, those citizens need not “trust” their governing body. Rather, they verify the claims of democracy coming from their government. Citizens will then be free to influence outcomes within their society because they hold a method of transmitting value that cannot be ceased or muted.
Indeed, “Don’t trust, verify.” is a platitude on the crypto space that makes mounds of sense in light of Trudeau’s actions.
Want to stay updated? Sign up for our newsletter to receive weekly content right to your inbox.
Be First to Comment