 Bitcoin's true believers have held on through its wild price swings because they see enormous value in its intrinsic properties, and now more than ever. While government money printing has created a global inflation crisis, Bitcoin has a fixed number of units that can't be increased. At a time when governments can block any transaction through the traditional banking system, Bitcoin is uncensurable, meaning no third party can prevent one person from sending value to another, no matter the reason. We support it because we've seen a need from dissidents under authoritarian regimes for it. Alex Gladstein is the chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation and author of Check Your Financial Privilege. He sees Bitcoin as freedom money that's especially useful for people living in authoritarian states. So when we come from first principles here in the global struggle for human rights, the most important thing is that it's confiscation resistant and censorship resistant and parallel and can be done outside of the government's control. Bitcoin proved hard to stop in Canada. In February, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared a state of emergency after truckers parked their rigs outside the capital and blocked a border bridge in protest of the government's vaccine mandates. His administration ordered financial institutions to freeze donations flowing into the truckers, but hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoin still got through. This man who asked to go by caribou and requested that we not use his real name organized the fundraiser. Here's the thing with Bitcoin versus fiat. Fiat, you can confiscate first, and then with Bitcoin, you have to go through the process of trying to confiscate funds before you actually take possession of them. And that asymmetry, it gives you the high ground as a defender, and it actually makes the law have to work first before action is taken. When you had GoFundMe, they were able to just freeze it with a phone call or a button click or whatever, but with Bitcoin they can't do that, so they have to literally file an injunction, they have to use police officers, they have to go to people's homes. It makes the government do the work to go like docks or arrest people, which is really important. Today, it's nearly impossible to stop Bitcoin, but not to uncover the real identities of those using it after their funds are sent or received. That's because Bitcoin transactions are recorded to a public ledger called the blockchain. By design, all participants are pseudonymous, but law enforcement agencies and the private firms they contract with have proven highly skilled at connecting Bitcoin transactions to real people, which is why advocates say that the Bitcoin community should do all it can to make Bitcoin more private. When you're running a fundraiser in a country in the Middle East or in Russia, for example, and you're doing human rights work or environmental work or labor rights work, it's already a crime to receive maybe foreign funding, it's already a crime to do human rights work, etc. So a secondary and very important consideration is then privacy, like how can we make sure they don't know so we don't get arrested. The Canadian government froze hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoin intended for the truckers, and police raided the home of the campaign's lead fundraiser to confiscate his computer. But advocates say this problem is solvable. Various tools already exist that can help Bitcoiners stay anonymous, they just need to start using them. Gladstein says that the Canadian fundraiser could have set up what's called a BTC pay server, which generates a different address in the blockchain for every transaction. I think that today it's fair to say that privacy is much better achievable than it was perhaps five years ago. There's a lot of amazing tools in Bitcoin. You have to kind of know what you're doing. With the Canadian truckers, we see how governments can take away money, but more importantly than that, once money is in the hands of government, they have shown with 100% certainty that that monetary control will be abused. Craig Ra is the creator of a privacy-oriented application for storing and transacting Bitcoin called Sparrow Wallet. The Hong Kong Codal organizer told Reason that if he had to do it all over again, he would have used Sparrow Wallet. I think that that worked people out to the idea of maybe we need to have some funds at least that the government can't just freeze, that we have access to no matter what. Integrated into Sparrow Wallet is Paynim, another tool for creating different payment addresses for every transaction, throwing off the sleuths. Are these privacy-preserving tools illegal? Generally, they're not, just as long as there's no third-party service involved. In April, the Fed seized Bitcoins valued at $34 million from an individual in South Florida accused of selling stolen passwords, whom they caught by connecting his online profile to an address previously listed to receive shipments. The suspect was charged with money laundering for using a so-called mixing service that exchanges Bitcoin for other Bitcoin to throw off the trail. Using a custodial mixer is money laundering in the United States. You can't just send your Bitcoin to somebody as part of a business or as a client and have them send you new Bitcoin. It's like Alpha Bay, not legal. What is legally protected as open-source software and free speech is CoinJoin's, because they are merely their open-source code. There's no one taking control of your Bitcoin. It's a collaborative spend. That's completely legal here. CoinJoin's, which are built into Sparrow Wallet, are another technique for obfuscating the trail. They combine lots of Bitcoin and then break them back into pieces. So it's hard to figure out whose money is going where. I think the best analogy for it is like smelting gold. This Bitcoin developer who asked to be identified as Samurai is the creator of the Samurai Wallet, which created Paynims and a CoinJoin protocol called Whirlpool. You take your Bitcoin, you add it into Whirlpool, and Whirlpool smelts it into new pieces that are not associated to the original piece. How much of this is going to be kind of an arms race between you and the blockchain analysis type companies, where they're just going to change their heuristics and get more sophisticated in their analysis? Yeah, there's some of that. I think that we can move quicker. And we've proven that we can move quicker than the chain surveillance companies. What is the reason for that asymmetry? You're a small open source team and generally you can move quicker without the bureaucracy of a chain surveillance company. A front line in the developing Bitcoin privacy arms race is the Lightning Network, which is a decentralized payment network for Bitcoin. The Bitcoin network itself can never scale to the size of a Visa or Mastercard because every transaction needs to appear on the blockchain. And if there were too much data stored on this public ledger, it would become too unwieldy for users all around the world to maintain a constantly updated copy, which is what makes the network decentralized and thus highly resistant to government control in the first place. The Lightning Network was designed to extend Bitcoin's capacity almost infinitely and it's analogous to a bar tap in which lots of small purchases are added up and combined into one transaction at the end of the night. But it also enhances privacy because like with a coin join, chain analysis firms can't easily untangle what transactions were included in the bundle. You might have a cash app or Coinbase account or some sort of account that the government knows about and you have income coming in, but then you withdraw into the Lightning Network and you get that same degree of privacy, ditto with deposits. There are cryptocurrencies specifically designed to anonymize transactions such as Zcash and Monero, which use zero knowledge proof encryption, but RA and Samurai have focused their attention on Bitcoin because it has wider adoption, a larger network, and it's more decentralized. Monero is interesting from a privacy point of view but less interesting from a store of value point of view and really store of value I think is going to become the driving reason people turn to Bitcoin in the coming years. The people are using Bitcoin. Bitcoin is here. It has the longest amount of history and has the largest user base. So really what makes sense for us to just say, okay, all of you, you're screwed privacy wise, excuse me, that's not how it works. An unsolved problem is that all of these privacy preserving tools require that users maintain custody of their own Bitcoin, which requires some technical savvy. It's much easier to store your Bitcoin on an exchange like Coinbase, which requires you to upload an image of your driver's license to comply with a federal anti-money laundering regulation called Know Your Customer or KYC. Samurai isn't available for iPhones and Sparrow Wallet doesn't exist yet for mobile at all. Samurai says that using Bitcoin anonymously might be more difficult, but that it's the raison d'etre of a technology rooted in the privacy obsessed cipherpunk movement of the 1990s. That message has gotten diluted as the years have gone on, but at its root, it's a cipherpunk tool to route around the state, and it's only useful if we use it that way. Ra says that the biggest privacy boon for Bitcoin would be a protocol change built into the network itself that combines transactions automatically and affect making coin joins the default. It's one of those things that everyone in the privacy Bitcoin world really has their eye on. So that's for me the most important thing that I would hope for in terms of the future. Gladstein says that in a world where entire countries like Russia are being cut off from the global financial system, Bitcoin's privacy and uncensorability are more vital than ever before, and that privacy preserving tools can make Bitcoin more like cash. The ATM model, it gives people the option to have freedom of money. Yes, the government will know all the ins and outs of what the flows are coming in and out, but they won't know what you do with it when you leave. And that that allows us to preserve the privacy of cash, which I think is essential for democratic society. It's not always easy being a Bitcoin hodler. This past year, the world's most widely held cryptocurrency lost more than half its value down 70 percent from its all time high of about 69 thousand US dollars. But the true believers say it's still early days and that eventually the price will catch up with the tremendous value that a fixed supply, censorship free and ultimately private money brings to the world. Why should the government be able to see everything that we do from a transactional point of view? I mean, it's it's a very Orwellian world where, you know, all of that stuff is just available and furthermore, once it becomes available, it becomes easy to stop.