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In this talk at the BTC Prague conference in 2024 I discuss the powerful connection between Bitcoin and human rights, highlighting what 99% of people are getting wrong. Learn how Bitcoin empowers people in the global South, supports freedom of speech, and offers financial inclusion. Watch now to see why Bitcoin is crucial for human rights activists!
Hello everyone, thanks for coming here. Although Michael Saylor is speaking on the main stage, I hope I’m not going to disappoint you. I don’t think so, to be honest. So, thanks for coming to my talk, which is called “Bitcoin and Human Rights: What 99% Are Getting Wrong.” So my name is Anita Posch. I’m the founder of Bitcoin for Fairness, a non-profit initiative whose goal is to bring Bitcoin knowledge to the people who need it the most. I’m the author of “(L)earn Bitcoin,” and if you’re free after my talk, I’m doing a book signing session at 10:45 at the Konsensus Network booth. I’m also the founder of Crack the Orange, which is a train-the-trainer online program for aspiring Bitcoin educators and community builders from the global South. Where we give scholarships to people who want to share Bitcoin knowledge on the ground in African countries.
I’ve been since early 2020 to Zambia, Namibia, South Africa, Botswana, Ghana, and Zimbabwe, where I spent the most time. I spent over a year in Zimbabwe, and we helped or supported other organizations to do Bitcoin education and networking in Nigeria and Malawi. Of course, I’ve learned a lot of things there. We did talks, for instance, in the capital of Zimbabwe, Harare. I’ve been to Zambia a few times; this is in Lusaka. I was talking at the University of Lusaka there, and we also did a Lightning workshop and other wallet workshops. I also visited in 2022 as one of the first people visited Bitcoin Ekasi in South Africa. You might have heard about this project. We brought hardware wallets, even a full node, a RaspiBlitz, and we did some workshops with the guys who, on the ground, bring Bitcoin education to their people in the township where they live.
I did a lot of media interviews, here, for instance, with Trevor Ncube. He’s a very famous journalist in Zimbabwe and has one of the biggest YouTube channels in Zimbabwe. Last but not least, we also are doing this. I’m doing workshops for human rights activists. Last year, we conducted one in Zambia, in Lusaka again, with 50 human rights activists from 26 African countries. And last week, I was at the Oslo Freedom Forum organized by the Human Rights Foundation, where we also gave workshops to share the essential knowledge about Bitcoin and how it can help human rights activists at the Oslo Freedom Forum.
So, the title is “What 99% Are Getting Wrong.” Yeah I mean seven years ago, I also knew absolutely nothing about Bitcoin, and I got many things wrong. But the main things people get wrong are they say: “Bitcoin is not a medium of exchange”, they also say: “Bitcoin is not an investment because it’s so volatile”, and they say “Bitcoin is a waste of electricity”. That’s basically what most Europeans or Westerners believe. ”Bitcoin has new rules”, and therefore they think Bitcoin is only for criminals. I actually agree Bitcoin is not a medium of exchange only because it’s a ripcord - that’s a term coined by Andreas Antonopoulos, one of the best Bitcoin teachers that we ever had or are having. Why? Because Bitcoin is revolutionary, it’s immutable, it’s public, it’s collaborative, it’s open, it’s resistant to censorship, and the most decentralized cryptocurrency that we know of.
Where I say the property of openness is one of the most important. It means that anyone, anywhere in the world, regardless of their status, wealth, gender, or nationality, can use Bitcoin. And you don’t need an ID for it, which is great. It’s permissionless. It gives everyone a seat at the table or in this row. There is no hierarchy in Bitcoin. Bitcoin users are as important as Bitcoin miners or developers. Then we have the resistance to censorship. This is so important because Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency besides Monero that is resistant to censorship. And that enables people to rise up against their authoritarian leaders and protest their government. Because without money, because without access to money, you don’t have freedom of speech or the freedom of association. That’s why I say that Bitcoin is the embodiment of human rights.
In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed by the United Nations. It has 30 articles, 11 of those I identified that are related to Bitcoin and that Bitcoin can enforce them. I will go through a couple of them. First, there’s the right to freedom and equality and the freedom from discrimination. Everyone around the world should have the same rights and the same possibilities and the same freedoms. But if we look at the map of freedom in the world, we see clearly that this isn’t true. The violet-colored countries are basically not free; you’re not free to speak your opinion or do what you want in these countries. It’s interesting that there is a correlation to the distribution of wealth, and of course you can see the orange and dark red nations are those who are the poorest. What are the reasons for this? One reason, especially for African countries, is colonialism and neo-colonialism by Western countries and also African leaders who say, “Now it’s our turn to eat.” Now we are the ones extracting value from the people, sadly.
Another reason is that in 1944, at the conference of Bretton Woods, a new order for the world was set. As you can see, it was set by the 44 Allied Nations who won the war. And they had good intentions, but this is a very homogeneous group. I have nothing against old white men, really, I don’t, but they can’t speak for billions of people. And they don’t know the problems that other people in the rest of the world have. And in their good intentions, they founded the World Bank, the IMF, and the BIS. The Bank of International Settlements was already founded after the First World War. After the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 in New York, the US set even tighter regulations, and this led to the exclusion of 1.7 billion people who are still unbanked, 58% of whom are women. These regulations trickle down to all these nations because otherwise they are being excluded from the US-powered financial system. And this also leads to the fact that a lot of banks are very bureaucratic. They don’t work. This is a picture from Zimbabwe; every week, every month, people are lining up in front of the banks to receive their wages, and if they’re lucky, there is some money in the ATM, maybe not.
It’s also rather ridiculous. The banking fees in South Africa are higher than the banking fees in Germany, although people in South Africa earn much less. Also, we have something like monetary colonialism. In 14 countries in Africa, where 200 million people live, they still have a fixed exchange rate to the euro with their currencies, the West African CFA and the Central African CFA. These countries have to deposit half of their foreign exchange reserves with the French treasury. That’s not sovereignty and independence; that’s still monetary colonialism.
Let’s take a look at the right to privacy and the presumption of innocence. To be honest, I didn’t know that the right to privacy is in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. The general manager of the Bank of International Settlements recently said, “We don’t know who’s using a $100 bill today, but with the central bank digital currency systems, the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of this money.” So they really want to know everything from us. We’re walking with open eyes, not everyone, but a lot of us, into a so-called panopticon. A panopticon was a building invented by the British in the times of the Industrial Revolution. Which is highly efficient. It’s built in a circle so that three guards can control 288 prisoners all the time. They walk around in circles, the windows or doors are open, and the prisoners never know when the guard is coming around. It’s a very creepy feeling, I must say, if I think about that situation. But this is where we actually are already living in. We’re living in a digital panopticon, and it’s getting worse. The European committee approved a prohibition of cash payments over €10,000 and a prohibition of anonymous cash payments over €3,000. And actually, it’s already illegal to send a 100 satoshi, which is like subscent in euros, to a custodial wallet like the Wallet of Satoshi.
Then there’s the presumption of innocence. You’re actually only guilty if a court has proven you did something wrong. But a few weeks ago, the developer of the Tornado Cash software, which is a tool to enable us to have privacy in Bitcoin use and cryptocurrency use, he was convicted to more than five years in prison in the Netherlands. Because the justification was he knew when he built the software that money from criminal activities would be entering the system that he built. That’s why he’s guilty. It’s basically like saying, “Oh, you’re manufacturing knives or guns. You know that people will kill others with the guns, so that’s why you go to prison.” It’s not happening. It’s only happening with our digital privacy and money. Also, KYC, which is know your customer verification when you need to show your ID and where your residence is, is basically the opposite of the presumption of innocence. All the time we want to use a bank account or a regulated cryptocurrency exchange, we have to prove that we’re not doing anything wrong upfront. And actually, KYC is the threat. That’s the problem because these companies, and also nation-states, never learn. There are so many hacks of databases where sensitive data is leaked onto the internet. It happened to Ledger, the hardware wallet manufacturer, in December 2020. All their customer data leaked. So that means when you buy a hardware wallet, you give them your residential address, your name, your phone number, your email address, and basically all this data is out there on the internet now. And you might have a bad surprise if someone wants to visit you because now people know that you own or hold bitcoin, and they know where you live. And these companies also don’t learn because the same thing happened three years later with Ledger again.
People tell me, “But I have nothing to hide.” It’s true, you might have nothing to hide. Most of us don’t have anything to hide. But the Zambian lesbian woman who walks on the street to protest for same rights, her bank account is being shut down, she’s sent to jail because she has nothing to hide. But if she had privacy, if she had money that she used that gives her privacy, they could not have shut down her bank account or her access to the financial system. Privacy in today’s world is really a luxury. You need to know how to do it so that you have privacy in Bitcoin. And there is a presumption of guilt. Then we have the freedom of movement. With all the immigration laws, we don’t have any freedom of movement anyhow. But if you need to flee your country because there’s a war, you can take your Bitcoin with you. You only need your 12 or 24 seed words, and you can move across borders and have access to your money again. But you only have that if you use Bitcoin with self-custody. You don’t have it when you have your Bitcoin on Bitpanda, Kraken, or Coinbase. Or how they are all called. These words also give you property of your Bitcoin. You are the sole owner of your Bitcoin. It’s a human right - the right to own property. All people in the world should have this right. Not all people have it, and mostly it’s women who don’t have it. In 75 countries in the world, women’s access to inheritance or ownership is restricted. In Zimbabwe, for instance, the law says women are allowed to inherit and own property, but still, on the countryside in rural areas, there are tribal courts. It’s still very patriarchal. You have widows selling the land they inherited from their late husbands, and they are punished by the tribal court. So basically, they are not allowed to use what they own.
Freedom of speech is also a very important right. Speaking of Zimbabwe, we helped a friend of mine in the capital set up a BTC Pay server to receive donations to pay for computers for the school. The person is a headmaster of a school, and they were able to buy these computers. A few weeks later, the computers were stolen. They reported it to the police, only the police to come back a few days later and arrest the headmaster, beat her, threaten her, and always ask her where the money is from. Bitcoin supports freedom of association because if you can’t donate to a cause that you think is important, you also can’t stand up for your rights. In Zimbabwe, for instance, it’s very common that opposition members are abducted, beaten to death, or not allowed to wear a yellow shirt because the color yellow was banned in the last election as it was the color of the opposition.
Another example of how Bitcoin helps is in Nigeria. In 2020, during the End SARS demonstrations where people were uprising against police brutality, the Feminist Coalition of Nigeria collected donations via their bank account. A few days later, the central bank shut down their bank account. And the young women remembered that there is something called Bitcoin. They set up a BTC Pay server and were able to receive donations again and support the protests. Another very important right is the right to security, the right to security for the free development of the personality of any person. I think that social security also means that you can rely upon a money that holds its value or at least that you can save money. We don’t have that anymore, and the example of Zimbabwe will show you how the fiat system can be taken to the extreme to steal from their own people. In Zimbabwe, first, you can use US dollars or the national currency to pay for goods. Very often, you have two tills, one for US dollars and one for Zimbabwean dollars. Then there are no coins. If you pay in US dollars, there are only banknotes. If you want change, you always get sweets or small things or a voucher, maybe. In every shop, you have an exchange rate board because every day the exchange rate to the US dollar changes as the value of the national currency goes down. So the first question in the morning is always, “What’s the rate today?”. I was there in Harare in September 2022. We were driving to a supermarket, and my friend said, “Hey, look at this guy. What does he have in his hands?” I looked, and it was a bag full of money, Zimbabwean dollars. This guy is definitely not rich; he just went to the supermarket.
So this is a typical Zimbabwean bread. It hasn’t only gotten smaller; it has also gotten more expensive in recent years. In 2019, the Zimbabwe dollar was introduced, and it had an exchange rate to the US dollar of one to one. This bread cost one US dollar and one Zimbabwe dollar in 2019. In 2020, when I came to Zimbabwe for the first time, it was 1 to 28, 1 to 55, 1 to 200, and by 2023, when I came back again, it was 1 to 4,000. In January this year, when I left Zimbabwe, the bread cost 12,000 Zimbabwean dollars, and then in April, it shot to 35,000 Zimbabwean dollars. What did the government do? They invented a new currency for the sixth time since 1980. It’s called Zimbabwe Gold (ZiG). And the reason for this high inflation is excessive money printing and looting. The Zimbabweans know it themselves. This is from a Zimbabwean website. The reason is corruption. The governing elites are stealing 1.5 billion dollars’ worth of gold every year. So you might wonder. They say the ZiG is backed by gold. Not even the government believes that because they don’t allow people to use the new currency to pay for passport issuance and things like that. And then on the 5th of April, they said there will be a new currency from one day to the other, and it went into effect on the 5th of April. But no one had the new banknotes because they only came around at the end of April. And at the same time you might say, “Okay, then use your online banking or mobile money.” Everything was breaking down because no system was prepared for the change. But still, there are headlines like this: That with the ZiG dollar, they finally want to turn their back on inflation. But then the next day, you see that Zimbabwe is planning rules to enforce the use of the ZiG dollar. If your currency has value, you don’t need to force people to use it.
There’s also financial repression. Every other year, they arrest money traders. You need money traders. Every person, every person has a private, trusted money trader there to exchange Zimbabwe dollars to US dollars, but that’s also a way to exchange it to Bitcoin. And this guy here, Nigel Mutanga, we met him a year ago in Zambia. We spoke about possibilities to bring more Bitcoin adoption and more Bitcoin liquidity into Zimbabwe. And when we flew back to Zimbabwe, we met with a trusted friend, and he told us, “Do you know who that is?” We were like, “No.” It’s the son of two Zanu-PF ministers, basically from the party that has been ruling since 1980. We were like, “Okay, thank you,” and we never met him again. Of course, you already have inflation in the ZiG dollar as well. At the beginning, it was 1 to 13.56. Nobody knows why it was that exchange rate, but only a month later it was already 1 to 20. So you don’t have any social security with inflation.
Then we have the right to a free and fair world. And I want to argue here. We always hear when the IMF makes a so-called structural adjustment, Zimbabwe wins a loan for $1.3 billion US dollars. Hurrah, congratulations! But for that, you need to do this, this, this, and this. Let’s remind ourselves of the goals of international development help. Richard Nixon said in 1968, “The main purpose of American aid is not to help other nations but to help ourselves.” Do you think that anything has changed since then? I don’t. That’s the reason why many African countries can never get out of their debt, because they are in a circle of debt, in a rigged system. That’s maybe the reason why the share of Bitcoin usage in sub-Saharan Africa is the highest in the world. That’s maybe the reason why in Nigeria the use of Bitcoin is exploding. Of course, the government there doesn’t want that to happen because they would lose their power because they steal from the people through the naira. They say the peer-to-peer traders are the reason why the naira has lost value, and that’s why they banned the peer-to-peer usage of crypto again. They even take further steps. They invited two Binance managers to come to the country to speak about possibilities. How to resolve the situation. What they did was they detained the managers; one of them is still in Nigeria. They took his passport away.
On the other hand, Africa empowers Bitcoin. As we said before many people here believe Bitcoin is a waste of electricity. I don’t think so, for all what you’ve heard, also how Bitcoin can help. There’s a mini pump station, a water station in Bondo, Malawi. We connected them with Gridless. Now there is small Bitcoin mining going on there, and they also built the electricity grid so that 2,000 people have for the first time electricity. The people in Bitcoin Ekasi in South Africa show that also poor people can use Bitcoin. In South Africa, you can spend your Bitcoin in over 2,000 stores. These are supermarkets like Impa or something. You can spend your BTC by paying for electricity. There’s a wallet called Machankura with which you can use Bitcoin without the internet. You use it on your regular phone like SMS. That’s also an interesting number: 20 is the average age of Africans, and this is the average age of Europeans. What do you think, where will we have more innovation, more people using Bitcoin? It’s the youth, of course. Because I showed you what’s happening to people who use Bitcoin in these countries, they can rise up, but they are not talking about it that much. That’s why I say Bitcoin is a silent revolution. It might sound illogical, but by using Bitcoin also here, you support human rights and human rights fighters and help make the world more fair because it gives access to anyone.
We have been doing a lot of educational work in African countries, but I also realized it’s great to be on the ground to build trust. But you also need constant education. To scale education and adoption, we need people on the ground who can share the knowledge with their friends, their peers, and their family. That’s why we built Crack the Orange, which is a train-the-trainer scholarship program for aspiring Bitcoin educators and community builders in the global South. Who can apply for a scholarship that means they are in the program for one year for free, and in the end, they can pass the exam if they learned enough to become a certified Bitcoin professional. This gives them on black-and-white confirmation that they really know a lot about Bitcoin. They can then look for jobs abroad or remote jobs in the Bitcoin space.
Everything I do is basically based on donations and grants. I don’t take sponsorships to stay neutral. So please donate if you have the possibility to anita.link/donate. If you want to stay updated on my work and what we are doing, please subscribe to our free newsletter at anita.link/weekly. Thank you very much.
