 Financial censorship, or cutting off the access to the global banking system, is one of the most powerful tools that governments have for punishing their enemies. The U.S. Department of Justice used it in 2013 through a program known as Operation Choke Point. It went after firearms dealers, payday lenders, and sex workers by pressuring banks to cut off their access to financial services. The federal government blocks marijuana businesses legal under state law from opening bank accounts. And the U.S. Department of Treasury financially censors other governments around the world that commit human rights abuses, or attack other nations, most recently Russia, for invading Ukraine. And Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau financially censored the Canadian truckers occupying the capital city of Ottawa. These illegal blockades and occupations received disturbing amounts of foreign funding to destabilize Canada's democracy. Whether financial censorship is used for a good cause or not, it's not clear that governments can hold on to this power for much longer. The question is, does Bitcoin solve this? Does a global decentralized monetary system that nobody can manipulate or control take away the power of the state to use financial censorship as a weapon for good or for ill? The answer, it turns out, is eventually, maybe, what there's more work to be done. That's Nick, who goes by NobodyCaribou on Twitter. And like most of the participants in this story, ask that we not use his full name. He helped start a Bitcoin-based fundraiser called Honk Honk Hodl. For the Canadian truckers, after GoFundMe was pressured into cancelling a fundraiser that had accumulated $10 million for the truckers. And after a judge blocked the distribution of $9 million from another crowdfunding platform. You know, my idea was like, if we get to $1,000 or $2,000 and I can go around and give $100 to different truckers, it would be amazing. It would be a cool experiment to do, so why not do it? Then crypto investors Jeff Booth and Greg Foss jumped in to lend their names in credibility, as did the popular Canadian YouTuber and streamer Ben Perrin, who goes by BTC Sessions. Things just started snowballing a lot quicker than anticipated. My initial thought was, oh, maybe we'll get a few thousand dollars and some people can buy some gas cards and some food or something. The amount they raised surpassed a million US dollars worth of Bitcoin. And so I would go through these phases of getting really excited and seeing that, okay, Bitcoin is on the world stage and it's showing that it solves a big problem. And then I would go into fear mode and I'd be like, if I fuck this up, it's going to look bad on Bitcoin as an entirety. As that number grew and as the GoFundMe started having issues, it became obvious that that was a bit of a glaring security hole, knowing specifically who the key holders were. In other words, with a million dollars on the line, the public figures involved worried that they'd become targets for theft or legal action if they were in control of the money. And because there was no clear plan for distributing the Bitcoin, donors began to complain, further ratcheting up the pressure. I started complaining on Twitter like, look, if you guys don't hand out the Bitcoin, then that's a problem. A Twitter user with the handle JWweatherman, who declined to provide his real name, threatened to sue the group if they failed to distribute the funds immediately to the truckers. If you get robbed, you should try to make it less profitable for the people that robbed you so that they don't rob future people, otherwise you're just funding those future thefts. The money was in what's known as a multi-signature Bitcoin wallet, in which five people held the passwords or private keys and three of them had to agree before the money could be released. Crucially, the Bitcoin they had raised wasn't being stored on an exchange. Bitcoin only solves the problem of financial censorship when individuals hold the keys to their own coins. When kept on an exchange, the companies in charge maintain custody, just like any other bank. That means the government can put pressure on exchanges to freeze the Bitcoin accounts, which is exactly what happened in Canada. The mounting pressure drove the three loudest promoters of Honk Honk Hodel to step away. Control over the money was mostly left in Caribou's hands. I was left holding this because I was single-handedly responsible for getting us into this mess, right? This beautiful mess of the start, but now it's like, whoa, this went way further than we ever thought. And I think Nick has just been an incredible human being through all of this. I think that the light should be shone on him for being on the ground and being such an incredible resource to the people that were there experiencing it. I didn't have as clear of a picture of what was going on in the ground as him. And so I'm glad that in the end it was his decision where those funds went. After raising a million dollars worth of Bitcoin, Caribou stopped accepting donations and turned to J.W. Weatherman, the Bitcoin tweeter who had threatened to sue him for help. When he reached out to me, he was completely on his own. It was a one-round show at that point. He had total control of the Bitcoin and had no idea what to do next. And the same reason that most people dislike him is the same reason that I went straight to him, which is he has the highest standards, he will hold me most accountable, and he will be the most vocal critic of whatever I do. So I was like, okay, this guy knows a lot. I think I need to reach out to him for help because at this point I need help. Weatherman crowdsourced ideas via a public Google Doc, and a volunteer programmer jumped in to write a script allowing them to quickly divide 14.6 Bitcoin worth approximately $630,000 at the time into 100 separate Bitcoin wallets that the truckers could transfer onto their phones. But for the last mile, they turned to a completely analog solution. Caribou printed out the codes needed to take possession of the Bitcoin wallets on sheets of paper and tucked them into envelopes. Then over the course of a day, he walked cab to cab with a cameraman, handing them out and showing the truckers how to use them. One live streamer even cocked one of the transactions in the middle of his stream in the cab of truck. There's eight grand of Bitcoin in there. In here. In there. As soon as the bank shut down, we had some big donors that were like, we need to get Bitcoin to these truckers. Myself and a partner went around and handed as many out as we could to truckers that we could find that we hadn't already given them to. And then basically I just like took a basically took a nap and tried to calm my brain. And then that night the mission was got to get the rest out because if it doesn't get out in 24 hours and people know I'm walking around with envelopes full of $8,000 of the Bitcoin, it's not a good situation for me or for, you know, anyone else. The reality was the longer we waited, the more those funds were in danger of being essentially stolen, stolen by the government, stolen by individuals who knew we were holding those funds. So just walking around handing out envelopes show that Bitcoin is censorship proof? Not quite. Satoshi designed Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Because when the last mile involves the physical world, it creates an opening for state interference. If Caribou had waited a few more hours, the police might have stopped him because of a court order that he stopped distributing Bitcoin collected through the fundraiser. It was part of a class action lawsuit filed by citizens and businesses in Ottawa, targeting anyone involved with the funding of the truckers. And about a third of the funds raised were in a wallet partially controlled by members of a trucker-affiliated non-profit. Caribou also had the codes necessary to access those funds and police came to his home, seized them and took control of the Bitcoin. He's raising funds for his own legal defense and says that he hopes to pass the seized funds along to the truckers after the lawsuit is resolved. In hindsight, we'll view this as a pretty pivotal moment in history, not just because of what happened here, but because of what this stimulated in the rest of the world. People of Ottawa misdirected their complaints that should have been aimed at the city and the federal government at the truck drivers. And that's where this class action lawsuit is coming from. This is lawfare. The process is the punishment. Others have criticized Caribou and Weatherman for making everything so public. In addition to the video evidence of the truckers receiving envelopes, we know that 50 of the 100 wallets, each containing 0.146 Bitcoin or about 6,300 US dollars, have been accessed so far. How do we know? Bitcoin may be uncensorable, but it's also radically transparent. Every transaction ever made is publicly available on the distributed database that undergirds Bitcoin known as the blockchain. Though the real identities of the truckers aren't stored in the blockchain, law enforcement has been remarkably successful at connecting Bitcoin addresses to their users, which is why so many of the people who bought and sold drugs on the Bitcoin-fueled online marketplace, the Silk Road, ended up being prosecuted. If we did it with privacy, there would always be a looming cloud over my head saying that guy might have stalled the Bitcoin. So the only way to prove to donors that the Bitcoin actually went to truckers was to videotape the Bitcoin going to truckers. Reason was also able to confirm on background through an intermediary that one trucker did access the Bitcoin using the directions handed to him. But Peering says that if he were to do it again after seeing his government's heavy-handed response, he would utilize some of the privacy-preserving functions that have come to Bitcoin since the Silk Road shut down in 2013, such as using a BitPay server that can move each donation to its own address and then into a wallet program to immediately combine it with other Bitcoin. There's funds stuck in legal limbo right now, part of that because they didn't go out quick enough. Develop a strategy, spend the funds, essentially try not to hold funds in one centralized location. And Weatherman says that while privacy is important for individual donors and recipients, radical transparency likely will remain a central feature of large Bitcoin fundraisers for the simple fact that people need to know where their money ended up. I think if you are going to do a big crowdfunding event, there's a lot more fun ways to do it. The really cool is to have a booth and hand out $50 at a time. You know, have a big line of people, everybody learning how to install blue wallet or green wallet on their phone and walk up and immediately get $50. Another idea, people have QR codes on their trucks or on their t-shirts so they can watch a YouTube video and see a QR code, scan it on YouTube and send the guy $20 without having to have any intermediaries. Despite the many challenges and the looming lawsuit, they all consider the fundraiser a successful proof of concept for Bitcoin as censorship resistant money, albeit one that underscored the need for more strategic planning, easy to use privacy measures, and a more robust infrastructure around Bitcoin. After all, not all truckers who received envelopes have transferred the Bitcoin into their own wallets. If those that have try to move those Bitcoin onto an exchange to trade them for Canadian dollars without properly anonymizing them, the transactions could get flagged, allowing the government to seize the money. With no easy off ramp into cash, spending the funds remains a challenge in a world where Bitcoin isn't yet universally accepted. I think it works as a censorship resistant digital money. It performed as well as cash or gold bars or anything else could have performed. And because it's technology and it's software, it would have been impossible for somebody to distribute that kind of cash or gift cards or really anything other than Bitcoin. Bitcoin was unstoppable. You can target the people who are holding the keys, but here's the thing with Bitcoin versus fiat. Fiat, you can confiscate first. 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. In terms of censorship resistance, the Bitcoin are the only funds that actually are not inaccessible right now. I think in general, people should look at these things and not look at it from a left or right politicized framework. If the government can shut down and seize the assets of the protest you don't like, then the opposing government can shut down and seize the assets of the protest you do like. In the end, Bitcoin is entirely apolitical. People you like, people you don't like, anyone can utilize that tool. The world is better off where that tipping of the scales is just removed. We exposed the tyrant, we showed that the media is just all lies and essentially is just an extension of government. We showed that there's a lot of risks in the legacy financial system with people being able to legally just steal your life. And I think we showed the world a playbook of how to do this in a way that actually makes a difference and doesn't do it by force but does it by being so peaceful and loving that you expose the darkness that has been kind of hiding and is now out there for everyone to see.