Good Morning Everyone,
The last week has seen incredible scenes in Canada as massive convoys of truckers, have been protesting Trudeau’s government and the ongoing erosion of the rights and freedoms of the citizens of Canada via lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
While supreme leader Trudeau and state media channels attempted to discredit the Canadian truckers labelling the estimated 70,000+ people a “a small fringe minority”, the protests have inspired many others globally to do the same including in Germany and Australia, aswell as sparking on the ground protests in Australia’s capital, Canberra.
Clearly many in the Canadian community did not agree with the narratives of Trudeau the tyrant, and responded by donating over $10,000,000 to the ‘Truckers For Freedom’ movement, via popular fund raising site, gofundme.
In predictable fashion, Ottawa City Council have called for gofundme to censor the transactions of hundreds of thousands of people that donated to the cause, and have been applying political pressure, and said they have also considered applying legal pressure and also asked the PM to do the same, to prevent these funds from being released and passed on to, who they were actually intended.
This is blatant financial censorship, and demonstrates how fundamentally broken the legacy model is, and how egregiously it can be pressured and controlled. The entire notion of a private company is being systematically dismantled in real time.
As long as parties need to trust an intermediary in the middle of their transaction, the system will always be inherently flawed.
It is absolutely mind blowing to see this level of financial censorship in a formerly democratic nation like Canada, but it should serve as a signal to the rest of us that the financial system has been fully weaponized and will be wielded against us. If you express a non-consensus view, particularly one in opposition to a tyrannical regime, you should set your expectations accordingly.
The saying “bitcoin fixes this” has never been more accurate, and situations like this while destructive and even effective in the short term, only accelerate the move to a decentralized monetary standard in the long term, as hundreds of thousands of people are awoken to the ways in which the legacy system will be used against them as a method of control.
Thankfully we do have bitcoin, and it works. Right now.
We do not need to continue to operate in a world where someone else gets to decide whether or not you are allowed to send $20 in support of a cause.
You are no longer forced to engage financially in a system that thrives on the capability to apply political and even legal pressure on an entity in the middle, be it Spotify or Gofundme, and have executive level power over the ultimate outcome.
The future is already here, and the Canadian truckers and many others are getting a 101 in decentralized systems designed to operate under adversarial conditions.
In an inspiring response to gofundme’s censorship, bitcoiners immediately started sending sats in support of the truckers in a completely open and permissionless way demonstrating the power of this censorship resistant protocol with over 298 contributors sending in excess of 22,000,000 sats.
What is particularly cool about this, is how open and transparent it actually is. Someone queried the instigator about the specifics:
In response he was advised that funds were to be transferred to a multi-sig wallet held by 3 individuals and they would allocate funds at their discretion.
Fully verifiable, transparent and in the open, and with no need to trust a bank or any other financial intermediary to do what they say they will do. And best of all, no individual or entity on the planet can exercise power over you and your ability to transact and express value. So powerful.
We are only just scratching at the surface of how transformational this innovation can be for human society.
While many political actors continue to choose authoritarian measures, they do so at their own peril as they fail to realize they are at the same time incentivizing and facilitating the rise of a new system. This is the power of an apolitical protocol that is truly neutral and censorship resistant. You love to see it!
Hope you all have a great day, share these letters around, and i’ll talk to you tomorrow.
AK
