At this year’s Oslo Freedom Forum, gigabrain Lyn Alden made the case that bitcoin is now liquid enough to be used in a human rights context, a compelling argument and one with which I agree.
Bitcoin, which now has a market cap of over $1.2 trillion, is less volatile than it was a decade ago and can now more readily be used to help empower those who’ve historically been financially disenfranchised. (The larger an asset’s market cap, the less volatile the price of the asset tends to become. When bitcoin had a much lower market cap in its early days, it wasn’t uncommon to see it lose over 80% of its value in crashes. For this reason, it would have been much harder to use it in a human rights context back then.)
Here are some examples of how Bitcoin is currently being used for human rights purposes:
- Bitcoin Dada educates African women about how to invest in and use Bitcoin. Many women in Africa live in patriarchal societies in which women aren’t permitted to own property. Bitcoin helps them subvert such rules, allowing them to save in the hardest asset ever known to humanity, with few being the wiser.
- Bitcoin Dua is a Bitcoin circular economy and a community center located in Ghana in which community members not only learn what Bitcoin is and how to use it but also skills that they can use to obtain jobs in which they can earn in bitcoin. This program is particularly relevant in a country in which the traditional currency was the worst-performing currency in the world in 2022 and continues to fall in value versus the US dollar.
- Lyudmyla Kozlovska, President of the Open Dialogue Foundation, someone who has been debanked by dictators herself, has been making the case to regulators in the United States and Europe that Bitcoin is a money and financial network of last resort for pro-democracy activists living under authoritarian regimes and that the right to use it needs to be protected. She argues that one of the first moves in the playbook of dictators these days is to cut dissidents off from the traditional financial system, leaving said dissidents with Bitcoin as their primary means to transact.
The work that these people, programs and institutions and the many others like them have done during the previous Bitcoin epoch has set the stage for the Empowerment Epoch — Bitcoin’s fifth epoch, the one in which it will become synonymous with the term “human rights.”
That said, this will not come without challenges.
High fees on the Bitcoin base chain will price certain users out of self-custody, pushing them to use Layer 2 solutions like Lightning and extensions of Lightning like ecash, non-traceable versions of sats that can be sent at almost no cost.
Companies like Fedi have developed a super app for the Global South that gives users access to Lightning, ecash and other freedom tech, while Machankura enables residents of various African countries to transact with bitcoin in a custodial manner using feature phones (non-smart phones). (Machankura is also working on turning feature phones into Bitcoin hardware wallets.)
Layer 2 solutions will not be perfect and there will be tradeoffs with each of them. But even considering the imperfections of the technologies that make bitcoin more usable, they still provide many around the world with access to a parallel financial system, serving as a hedge to the existing monetary and financial systems.
As new challenges arise, I have little doubt that organizations like the Human Rights Foundation will continue to bring activists and educators together with developers and entrepreneurs to meet these challenges and to help bring bitcoin — the people’s money — to those who need it most in this, the Empowerment Epoch.
This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.