Authoritarian governments worldwide are increasingly using financial repression to disable their challengers. By surveilling and freezing bank accounts, they can stop democratic opposition in its tracks. At the same time, human-rights groups from Nigeria to Russia to Hong Kong are turning to Bitcoin — a censorship-resistant digital currency that can be used without tying one’s transactions to one’s personal information — to receive donations, run payroll, and keep their operations going, even if dictators want them to stop.
Fifty years ago, governments could not easily monitor or control the economy at the level of the individual. Most daily transactions across the planet were still conducted through cash, or maybe paper check, did not immediately register in a database, and could not be used to model the behavior of citizens or surveil dissidents. That world is long gone.
Today, when digital spending dominates, most transactions are instantly visible, or at least easy for authorities to look up later. What you spend says more about you than what you say. Governments can see who buys what, who pays whom, and who donates to which cause. Enemies of the state (real or imaginary) can be shuttered with the arbitrary click of a button — no court warrant needed. Sometimes, as is the case in China, a decision to stop a critic’s money does not even have to be made. An AI tool automates the process, bringing science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s idea of “precrime” into dystopian reality.
Worse still, the paper bills or digital credits available to people living under authoritarian regimes are designed to collapse in value. Strongmen routinely inflate their national currencies to fund police states, wars, security forces, and lavish lifestyles at the expense of the living standards of average citizens. Take Egypt as an obvious example: Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is famous for receiving international bailouts of billions of U.S. dollars while conducting overnight devaluations of the Egyptian pound, which has lost more than 85 percent of its purchasing power against the U.S. dollar in the past decade. Sisi clings to power, while the lower and middle classes are paying twice or even three times as much for basic goods as they did just a few years ago.
Finally, many victims of tyranny face financial isolation, even if they personally did nothing wrong. Broad-based international sanctions on countries combined with corporate policies that freeze out various nationalities end up hurting millions of innocent people. Because of the crimes of their rulers, citizens of countries such as Iran, for example, do not enjoy the easy payment networks, online shopping, or access to global goods and services that we in Western democracies enjoy.
The world of democracy promotion does not give financial repression anywhere close to the same airtime as election rigging, news censorship, or political prisoners. Yet this type of repression is perhaps the most profound: Not everyone may be a journalist or opposition politician, but everyone uses money. Only about 13 percent of the world enjoys both a liberal democracy with free speech and property rights and a “reserve currency” — that is, a monetary unit sound enough that other governments are interested in accumulating it in their reserves. The other 87 percent of humanity was born into either an authoritarian regime or a collapsing fiat currency (government-issued and not backed by a commodity). Simply put, democracy activists are turning to Bitcoin because the existing system is not working for them.
A Banking Crisis for Democratic Activism
On 16 June 2025, Russian democracy advocate and Team Navalny YouTube head Ruslan Shaveddinov shared that his “favorite bank,” Revolut, “gave in to pressure from Putin’s government and blocked my accounts.”1 Two of his colleagues, Dmitry Nizovtsev and Nina Volokhonskaya, were also debanked. Shaveddinov speculated that Revolut had folded to Russian state pressure. A few hours later, the accounts were unfrozen, but not before the scandal proved an obvious point: Bank accounts are political, and can be turned on and off by the powers that be. And if those powers are the people you are criticizing or opposing, then your ability to use traditional finance might be over.
Activists in exile like Shaveddinov must be careful about their banking. But for activists still living inside dictatorships, it is probably already impossible to use traditional financial rails. According to the Human Rights Foundation, 5.7 billion people live in authoritarian regimes, meaning that the overwhelming majority of democracy activists are living in places where their payments, fundraising, and savings are completely broken.2
Consider a basic logistical operation for a democracy organization in an autocracy such as Turkey. If a foreign donor wants to provide a Turkish nonprofit with a US$25,000 grant, it sends a bank wire to the group’s domestic bank account. Assuming the funds are released from the home country (not always a guarantee, as Western banks may deem some payment destinations too risky), the receiving Turkish bank will see that the donor organization has sent $25,000 to an activist group and then share that information either in real time or shortly after with regime officials. Best-case scenario, the funds will be watched or seized. Worst case, the recipient will be jailed or even disappeared, and the entire organization might be shuttered or identified as an extremist group, traitors, or terrorists.
Even if foreign funds do reach an activist group inside an autocracy, those funds will not be in U.S. dollars but rather in the local currency — the Turkish lira, perhaps, or the Egyptian pound or Nigerian naira, all of which have been devalued by more than 50 percent over the past few years by their regimes. Moreover, the transaction will have likely taken weeks, or perhaps even months, to finally settle into the account of the resource-pressed nonprofit, which is now, at a minimum, on the regime’s watchlist.
This is a daily routine for nonprofits trying to bring funds in from other countries or seeking to pay staff or service providers abroad. The legacy banking system simply does not work well enough anymore to fund democracy work in difficult environments. It is not safe enough, it is not efficient enough, and it is not fast enough.
This is where Bitcoin shines. Now imagine the same Turkish scenario using the open-source digital currency: The recipient nonprofit communicates by encrypted message with the donor, providing a fresh Bitcoin address (a string of numbers and letters generated by hitting “receive” inside a Bitcoin wallet application) and any required paperwork. The donor then simply sends the funds, which arrive in minutes (or seconds, if they are sent over the Lightning Network, a way to send Bitcoin more cheaply, quickly, and privately). The donor shares that information with its financial team (all gifts need to be tracked for Western charities to retain nonprofit status) — but in this case, the Turkish government has no idea that critical support arrived just in time for the journalist investigating corruption, the environmentalist protecting a forest, the labor leader coordinating a strike, the artist plotting a public mural, or the election monitor heading to the polling station.
The Bitcoin gift is now available for the local nonprofit to use, without permission from local authorities. Perhaps the group will use a peer-to-peer marketplace on WhatsApp or Telegram to immediately swap the Bitcoin for stacks of paper notes. Perhaps they will pay salaries directly in Bitcoin or buy goods or services with the growing number of global merchants that accept Bitcoin. Maybe they will use a website such as Bitrefill to pay for groceries, car rentals, hotels, online shopping, or phone minutes with Bitcoin. Or maybe they will save the Bitcoin for the future, planting a seed that will grow like a tree instead of “saving” Turkish lira, which would sprout nothing at all. No matter, it should be plain to see that Bitcoin, logistically speaking, is a revolution for activism, an innovation that has arrived just in time to help nonprofits navigate an era where the banking system no longer works for them.
Going Where the Dollar Cannot Go
For many human-rights advocates, the U.S. dollar simply cannot get the job done. Take the case of Roya Mahboob, the Afghan humanitarian and entrepreneur. As a young girl in Herat, she and her family were forced to flee to Iran after the 1996 Taliban takeover. Eventually, after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the Mahboobs moved back to their hometown, and Roya started to see signs of technology emerge in the city. She glimpsed what she described as a “box that could talk to other boxes” inside a cafe, but girls were not allowed to use the computer. Persistent, she eventually convinced the cafe owner to allow her to use it before the shop opened, and eventually became invaluable as a computer-repair specialist. She did the same at the local university and, after graduating, started the Afghan Citadel Software Company, which employed women throughout Afghanistan, helping to publish their blogs and enabling them to do online microwork. Payments, however, were a big problem.
Mobile money never materialized in the country, and PayPal and Venmo were not available to Afghans. Cash was problematic, as male relatives would seize it from women when they came home. But many Afghans had cellphones and occasional internet connections. So, Roya thought, why not try Bitcoin? She had heard about Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention from a friend in New York and decided to give it a shot. In the summer and fall of 2013, as she began paying her employees in the new digital currency, one Bitcoin went from being worth $50 to being worth more than $1,000. But then, as the largest Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, began to collapse and then eventually declared bankruptcy, the exchange rate cascaded in a series of crashes below $200. Roya stopped paying her employees in Bitcoin, but she could not shake the idea of a money that anyone could use, regardless of gender.
One of these early employees was forced to flee Afghanistan. She eventually settled in Germany, where she could access her Bitcoin using her seed phrase (a bit like a password, a seed phrase can be used to recover access to one’s Bitcoin). Those coins, now worth considerably more, paid for her new life. Roya’s sister Elaha, meanwhile, would buy Bitcoin back from the girls who worked at Roya’s company when they needed to buy something and the merchant did not accept the new currency. Elaha saved the coins and later used them, at a twentyfold increase in value, to help finance her education at Cornell University. In 2014, Roya launched the charity Digital Citizen Fund to teach skills to young Afghan women and girls. She made sure to include Bitcoin training, eventually educating more than 25,000 women and girls about the digital currency and other technologies.
In early 2021, Roya could see that the American-backed government in Afghanistan, even though it had been positive for women in her country, would not last forever. She tried to convince her parents to convert some of their savings into Bitcoin, but they would not listen. That summer, Kabul fell to the Taliban in just a few weeks. Most people fleeing lost everything: Their money could not be moved across borders, and the sudden escape did not provide citizens enough time to liquidate and sell their belongings. So Roya’s parents, like many others, suffered financial catastrophe. But not Roya, or the girls who had learned about the digital currency, whose value was stored on the internet and was accessible with a password that could be written down, hidden, sent to a friend abroad, or even memorized.
Today, after more than 1,300 days where Afghan girls have been prevented from going to school, Roya continues to fund underground education inside Afghanistan with Bitcoin. The teachers, who receive the payments directly from Roya and her team, can spend their Bitcoin at peer-to-peer markets or exchange them for cash with local contacts. It is technologically impossible to use the dollar banking system to do this critical work, but with Bitcoin, it is simple.
Monetary Freedom
The struggle for monetary freedom is deeply rooted in many global democracy movements. Despite the issue of currency being mostly ignored in human-rights reports, the mechanics of money are at the heart of some of the biggest democratic struggles worldwide, both ideologically and logistically.
One only need look at the 85-year struggle for independence and democracy in Togo, a former French colony in West Africa, sandwiched between Ghana and Nigeria. When the French empire retreated from its possessions in the region in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a tenacious prodemocracy figure emerged in Togo: Sylvanus Olympio. A visionary leader and ardent advocate for democratic rights in the newly independent country, one of Olympio’s most important goals was monetary freedom.
As part of French colonialism, Paris imposed the colonial franc (CFA) currency on its subjects, gaining control and rent over the labor and resources of these regions. Olympio wanted to end that domination, and championed an independently controlled currency for his new country. In January of 1963, just days before he was set to pass this change into law, Olympio was murdered by French paramilitary thugs, and a dictator by the name of Gnassingbé Eyadéma was installed. Gnassingbé would end up ruling for more than forty years, and his son still oppresses Togo today. The key components of the family’s rule are French military support and Togo’s use of the CFA. The deal gives France first right of refusal on the country’s exports (including oil, uranium, and timber); has historically allowed France to store and collateralize Togo’s national gold savings; and gives France an enormous market (Togo is one of fifteen CFA countries in West and Central Africa, home to three-hundred-million people) to sell goods at artificially high prices.3
Farida Nabourema is a third-generation democracy activist from Togo, and her family has been pushing for monetary freedom since colonial times. Her grandfather fought against the French, and her father resisted the Gnassingbé regime, leading to his frequent arrest and eventual complete deplatforming from any banking or financial services. Farida became an activist too, helping to mobilize more than a million Togolese to the streets in 2009 when she was just a college student. She, too, has been debanked, as has nearly everyone in the Togolese democracy movement. Because the Gnassingbé dictatorship controls the financial system, the regime can easily censor “troublemakers,” making it very hard for human-rights and protest movements to mobilize and thrive.
Farida is pushing back in two ways: first, against the CFA system and Togo’s lack of monetary freedom, and second, against Gnassingbé’s tyrannical control of economic activity. She is doing this with Bitcoin. What first started as personal use of the digital currency to get money both from inside Togo and from abroad to democracy groups (impossible to do with U.S. dollars) became, under Farida’s guidance, a nationwide tactic to educate and strengthen the democracy movement so that the government can no longer paralyze it through debanking.
Seeing the impact of Bitcoin on her own country’s democracy struggle, Farida wanted to share these lessons across the continent. In 2022, she launched the Africa Bitcoin Conference. Now in its fourth year, the conference brings together Bitcoin activists, educators, and entrepreneurs from more than forty African countries.4 Participants share tips and tools on a shared journey of building a peer-to-peer African economy beyond state control. For Farida, and for so many others, there will be no democracy in Togo or in Africa unless money is democratized and control rests in the hands of its people. They view Bitcoin as one of the few things that gives people a way out of both colonialism and dictatorship.
A Quiet Revolution
Cuba’s democracy movement remains fractured, isolated, and woefully underfunded. This is in part because it is so hard to get money in and out of the country. In 2021, the Communist Party began to phase out Cuba’s two-tiered peso system, where state workers would earn Cuban pesos, trading at a rate of 24 to the dollar, and foreigners would use Cuban convertible pesos, which traded at par with the dollar. The peg proved impossible to hold, and the peso was effectively allowed to float. This has resulted in hyperinflation, with the peso now trading at beyond three hundred per dollar, decimating the wages of most of the island’s workers.
The new state scheme to attract foreign hard currency is the misleadingly named Moneda Libremente Convertible (MLC), which is a bit like a gift card for Cubans to buy nice items at higher-quality stores. Merchants that sell meat or electronics or decent clothing accept only MLC. But the pesos earned through traditional state work are not convertible to MLC and can buy only the most basic of goods. So Cubans must get family or friends abroad to “top up” their MLC account using euros, reals, Canadian dollars, and the like. The regime harvests the foreign hard currency and credits individuals with MLC, which they can finally use to buy what they need.
To avoid this misery and rent-seeking, a growing number of Cubans have turned to Bitcoin. I interviewed dozens of Cubans on the island who had started to use and save Bitcoin in the year 2020, when one Bitcoin was trading at around US$5,000.5 Imagine saving your wages in a currency, the Cuban peso, that collapsed by 90 percent versus saving in a currency that has appreciated by 2,000 percent, if you opted for Bitcoin. This is a decision many, many Cubans have made out of necessity in the past five years.
Today, there are entire underground schools in Cuba that teach citizens how to use Bitcoin safely, how to spend them, and how to educate local merchants to accept them.6 My First Bitcoin — an open-source educational guide first developed in El Salvador — has been transformed by Cubans into a version that is popular on the island, giving teenagers (and anyone) an easy and relatable way to learn about the currency.7
Now new Bitcoin tools are gaining traction in Cuba before other places. An example is eCash, a financial-privacy technology invented in the 1980s by the cryptographer David Chaum, which has picked up new life in the past few years after being rebuilt on top of Bitcoin.8 The idea is that Bitcoin is sent to an eCash “mint,” which provides users with fully private, instantly transferrable, extremely cheap “digital cash” that can be spent even when the user has no internet access — a very useful feature in Cuba. How does this work? The same way as plastic credit cards: Only the merchant, who must receive alphanumeric information from the customer, needs the internet.
Each day, families abroad send remittances into Cuba in Bitcoin, democracy activists break financial chains with Bitcoin, and ordinary Cubans are opting out of the corrupt peso-MLC system and using Bitcoin instead. And there is nothing the regime can do about it. This is a quiet, peaceful revolution, and slowly, steadily, it is enriching individuals and giving them an escape from the “revolutionary” tradition of state theft.
A Lifeline for Democracy Movements
Over the past five years, in places as disparate as Belarus, Hong Kong, India, Nicaragua, Nigeria, and Russia, authoritarian regimes have targeted human-rights defenders with financial repression. In Belarus, the Lukashenka regime has systematically debanked independent media and the opposition. In Hong Kong, any company or organization affiliated with the prodemocracy movement has had its bank accounts frozen. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has gone on a debanking spree, targeting the country’s main opposition party as well as environmentalists, Amnesty International, and antislavery campaigners. In Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega’s regime has debanked even the church and universities in order to further consolidate the dictator’s control. In Nigeria, the government froze the fintech apps used by the Feminist Coalition (FemCo), the movement at the heart of the 2021 #EndSARS protests, to block its access to funding. And in Russia, Vladimir Putin’s regime has debanked key democracy groups, including Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, and confiscated their funds.
In each case, Bitcoin is being used locally to keep democratic resistance going, even when the government is working to stop it. In Belarus, Bitcoin payments have become a normal part of activism, widely used especially by youth-led civil society groups such as BYSOL, as the digital alternative is a safer option than carrying paper notes across the border. In Hong Kong, political prisoners jailed during the anti–National Security Law protests are now being released, but with a catch: They cannot open bank accounts. So, some organizations are sending them subsidies in Bitcoin. In India, debanked antislavery campaigners have found ways to get funds in the form of Bitcoin to partners inside the country, and in Nicaragua, democracy activists have for years been teaching individuals and civil society groups how to receive, save, and spend Bitcoin so that they can continue their work without bank accounts.9 In Nigeria, FemCo raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bitcoin through the open-source fundraising technology BTCPay Server, allowing the group to continue supporting protests after the government froze its traditional financial rails.
In all these cases, the dollar could not work. It simply cannot be used for essential human-rights activities. But Bitcoin can, and its relevance will only increase in the age of central-bank digital currencies (CBDCs). CBDCs are a way for governments to reclaim power from the private sector by issuing digital money directly from central banks, as opposed to banks or tech companies, which is the norm today. CBDCs also are a way of replacing privacy-protecting paper cash with surveillable digital-government fiat.
According to the Human Rights Foundation’s CBDC Tracker, a free online tool, more than 110 governments are experimenting with CBDCs, and some authoritarian regimes, including China and Nigeria, have implemented CBDCs in daily public life.10 In a CBDC-dominated future, salaries could have negative interest rates or expiration dates, and governments’ real-time knowledge of financial flows could become much stronger. Money could even be programmed so that certain things cannot be purchased. For example, in Thailand, the government is distributing a CBDC prototype with spending limited to certain vendors, purchases restricted to certain goods, and funds expiring after six months. This is a civil-liberties nightmare, but one that can be circumnavigated with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin, Not Crypto or Blockchain
A fair objection from many critics of digital currency is: What about all the scams? What about FTX or all the crypto Ponzi schemes? In fact, “crypto” is, broadly speaking, a giant scam. Out of the more than twenty-thousand existing “cryptocurrencies,” apart from Bitcoin and stablecoins, few have any real-world use. Nearly 100 percent of these tokens were launched with the sole purpose of enriching their creators at the expense of the public, who buy the tokens at an inflated price in search of dollar gains. It might look something like this: A group of people creates “Democracy Coin,” and then gets a major exchange to list it for 5 cents per token. Beyond the marketing costs, it was essentially free to mint a hundred-million tokens, and fifty million were sold to insiders at a one cent per token valuation. So already, the minters have earned $500,000. Now, the rest of the tokens are offered to the market. The result is usually something like the token trading up to 10 cents (allowing the insiders to make another $500,000 or more) before crashing all the way down to fractions of a penny. Of course, the insiders have a set price when they all sell, leaving the public with empty bags.
These shenanigans, of course, have nothing to do with human-rights activism. Neither do FartCoin, DogeCoin, or TrumpCoin. They are simply get-rich-quick schemes. Users should know that they are just getting fleeced. This is why it is critical to separate “crypto” from Bitcoin, which offers true decentralization, censorship-resistance, and digital scarcity.
Next time someone asks about “crypto” or “blockchain,” ask them: What token are they referring to? Solana? Ethereum? Zcash? Shiba Inu? This usually results in a much more productive and specific conversation. And if they cannot be specific, that is a red flag, especially in a world where so many token issuers are simply trying to trick nonprofits into using their token so that they can claim more real-world adoption.
Stablecoins, it must be said, do have global humanitarian uses. In many countries, they (especially the Tether on Tron variety) are even more popular than Bitcoin. It makes sense: Most people live in places where the fiat currency is a disaster with incredibly high inflation, so they seek refuge in the dollar. A stablecoin is basically a eurodollar that you can hold in your pocket without identification — essentially an offshore dollar issued outside the U.S. banking system, without any of the guarantees and protections of the U.S. banking system.
Stablecoins give people dollar access, which is often a big upgrade over their local fiat currency, but with many risks. First, virtually all stablecoins in circulation today are centralized, and can be and often are confiscated or censored. Second, they can lose their peg and go to zero, as happened a few years ago with Terra. Third, they actually increase state power and the network effect of state money. Moving forward, I suggest that for democracy work, we think of digital currencies in three ways: Bitcoin, stablecoins, and everything else.
Addressing Bitcoin’s Critics
Bitcoin, of course, is no panacea. But democracy activists know that. They understand how to deal with the currency’s volatility, how to trade it into local fiats such as dollars, euros, or pesos, and how to use it with a decent degree of privacy. Or at least, this information is available online anywhere.
The overwhelming majority of Bitcoin critics live in the United States or Europe, and are blinded by enormous financial privilege. Meaning, the currency they were born into is accepted worldwide; it is easy for them to buy stocks and bonds to hedge against currency devaluation; they can seamlessly send money to friends and family; the government actually protects their savings during a bank run; and money is not so aggressively politically censored. But this is only the case for about a billion people who were fortunate enough to be born in countries with reserve currencies, rule of law, free speech, and property rights. The other seven-billion people on the planet were born in countries with collapsing currencies or authoritarian regimes. Their currency is virtually useless outside their own country, and their average savings instrument is something like collapsing paper notes, sheet metal, or cattle.
Many intellectuals, journalists, academics, and policymakers in the West dismiss Bitcoin because their money system has always worked well enough for them, and they think alternatives are silly, harmful, or wasteful. This financially privileged reasoning will fade away as more people learn the truth about Bitcoin and the broken global monetary system. Popular criticisms of Bitcoin fall mainly into three camps: volatility and adoption, energy use, and criminality.
On volatility and adoption. At this point, Bitcoin users understand that the dollar exchange rate changes every day and goes through cycles. From a penny to more than $100,000, Bitcoin’s journey has not been linear. It is best to think of Bitcoin as a very good medium- to long-term savings instrument if one is saving for five years or more. If your window is less than that, it is a riskier savings asset, there is no question. But most human-rights workers are not saving capital for many years. They are using Bitcoin for its other features — as a way to move value from one place to another beyond government control. Once Bitcoin reaches its destination, the receiver can sell it, swap it for cash or stablecoins, or spend it.
Bitcoin users in countries including Brazil, Costa Rica, Ghana, and Kenya can use apps such as Tando to spend their Bitcoin with virtually any merchant or service provider. For example, you might get out of a cab in Nairobi and ask if you can pay with the African mobile-money service M-Pesa, which is standard. If the driver agrees, you can use your Tando app to pay in Bitcoin. The driver would receive Kenyan shillings and never have to know anything about Bitcoin. These apps are growing in number and scale around the world and, in combination with spending platforms such as Bitrefill and Azteco, they make Bitcoin operations significantly easier for activists. We are just at the beginning of merchant adoption. Square, which operates more than four-million digital-payment readers in the United States and beyond, is activating Bitcoin payments in mid-2025. This will help activists and others living in the United States who want to more fully integrate Bitcoin into their lives.
On energy use. Bitcoin miners — specialized computers that use electricity to secure the Bitcoin network — are like electric vehicles (EVs): Neither produces any emissions. As with EVs, what we need to pay attention to is the energy mix of the electricity that powers the miners. And the reality is that the mix going into the Bitcoin network is more green (52.4 percent of miners use sustainable resources) than the U.S. grid that powers American EVs (just 40 percent of that energy comes from sustainable sources) — and is on a trend to become greener each year.11 Bitcoin mining is an intensely competitive industry with tiny profit margins. Miners relentlessly seek out the cheapest energy on earth. And the cheapest energy is always energy that is stranded, wasted, or otherwise unused. Miners simply cannot compete with residential or industrial purchasers of energy. They would go out of business.
Instead, mining is increasingly being drawn to base-load energy sources: hydro, nuclear, or geothermal, where the demand does not completely match the supply and energy sometimes goes unused; intermittent sources of energy such as wind and solar, which often produce at times of day when energy demand is not peaking; and methane. In all cases, Bitcoin miners are happy to pay to consume energy from these sources, cutting their pollution to virtually zero.
On criminality. Opponents of Bitcoin will, of course, seek to besmirch any users as “criminals.” And while it is true that all the democracy activists mentioned in this essay are considered criminals by their governments, that is not really the point. To better understand, we can compare Bitcoin users to those of another open-source technology — Signal. Anyone can use Signal. But it gives asymmetric power to individuals, not nation-states. It is not that significant that Putin can secretly message with his daughter, but it is significant that tens of millions of Russians can secretly message and conspire against their dictator. Likewise, it is not that big of a deal that criminals can use Bitcoin (most do not, since it is very hard to buy or sell very large amounts without a trace), as large-scale criminal enterprises have excellent banking connections: Cartels use HSBC, Hamas uses Qatar-based banks, dictators control their own banks, and so on.
Ultimately, it is dictators who are the biggest criminals, and for dictators Bitcoin is a disaster. Satoshi’s invention puts money back into the hands of the people, giving them free speech, property rights, and open capital markets. This is exactly what dictators fear most, because they need censorship, confiscation, and closed capital markets to survive. This is why you see tyrants such as Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin criminalizing Bitcoin payments. Tyrants do not like money that they do not control.
Getting Started with Bitcoin
For any grant-makers, or nonprofits reading, integrating Bitcoin into your work will make you more effective donors or activists, and there are some immediate steps you can take to get started. If you are a grant-maker, begin by giving at least some small grants in Bitcoin, if only to spare your own team time and stress. Sending a Bitcoin payment into a difficult political environment takes minutes as opposed to the hours or days it sometimes takes to move money through the banking system from Washington or New York to a place like Sudan or Burma. When you make a grant, ask if the recipient wants a bank wire or Bitcoin — you might be surprised by how many request the latter. Once your accountants issue a grant in Bitcoin instead of a wire transfer, they will never want to go back.
If you are a civil society group receiving funds, the first order of business is to start using Bitcoin. This is much easier than it was five years ago: The apps are much better, and the currency is more widely accepted and better known. You can learn how with a webinar or class (such as the free one that HRF provides12) or attend a local Bitcoin event and ask for help. A good goal is to get comfortable receiving, holding, and spending Bitcoin without using custodial services or giving up personal information. For people fighting dictatorship, it is not safe to store Bitcoin with a company under the government’s thumb or to link their Bitcoin to their identity. Beginner wallets one might learn with include Muun for on-chain Bitcoin, Phoenix or Wallet of Satoshi for Lightning, or Fedi or Zeus for eCash.
Next would be learning how to passively receive Bitcoin donations through a widget on your organization’s website, which can be done easily through an open-source software such as BTCPay Server. Donors often want to give Bitcoin, as they do not have to pay capital-gains tax on them when they are gifted to a registered charity or educational institution. Critically, do not use a service that immediately harvests the Bitcoin and gives you dollars or euros. Learn how to accept Bitcoin directly and how to store them safely (without relying on a third-party custodian) with the help of a company such as Casa or Unchained that provides “collaborative custody” solutions. Here, instead of your organization holding the only private key (password) to access the Bitcoin, an “account” is created with three passwords and two are needed to withdraw, for example. This will allow you to geographically or socially distribute risk and also to hold your funds as an organization, but in a way where operations will be unaffected if one person loses their password or goes offline.
Once you get comfortable receiving and storing Bitcoin, then you can start using them to make grants or payroll or to buy things in your local economy. Again, you would be surprised by how many merchants are willing to accept Bitcoin if asked. Then, once you are comfortable making payments in a new system where you are in control and no one can stop you, it will be time to begin learning and integrating other technologies and open-source AI tools.
The former Venezuelan political prisoner and democracy advocate Leopoldo López is pioneering this at the World Liberty Congress, where he is using his years of experience training activists to design a new kind of online learning. Users will join World Liberty Congress online seminars using a decentralized social protocol called Nostr, which is accessible to anyone. Unlike Zoom or Teams, Nostr does not require users to expose any personal information to corporations or governments.13 All that is required to set up a Nostr app is a public and private key (email address and password). From there, you own your own data and online identity, and you can move between clients such as Primal or Damus easily, instead of being trapped on today’s web in YouTube or X or Instagram, unable to move your followers or posts from one to the other. Nostr is also integrated with Bitcoin, so that if you join an online class, the teachers can easily “zap” you small amounts of Bitcoin, which can be shared with any creators online regardless of where they live, no bank account or paperwork required.
As López explains, X was banned in Venezuela, so the ability to access a communications network that cannot just be turned on and off is huge, especially when it also connects users to a global monetary network that is equally unstoppable. The final steps are open-source AI tools and “vibe coding” for activism. The latter is a new technique, coined by former Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy, enabling individuals to use AI-based apps such as Replit or Goose to create new apps, websites, presentations, or reports without knowing a line of code. There are also privacy-preserving AI agents — Maple, for example — that can help dissidents in difficult situations. Armed with tools such as Bitcoin, Nostr, and vibe coding, today’s activists are more powerful than ever before. They can organize, transact, and scale work without relying on corporations that expose their personal data.
López is not the only prominent activist using “freedom tech”: Srdja Popovic — a founder of Otpor!, the nonviolent Serbian protest movement that brought down Slobodan Miloševiæ — is too. His Center for Applied NonViolent Actions and Strategies (CANVAS) equips nonviolent prodemocracy movements with tips and tactics for success. CANVAS has integrated Bitcoin training into its work, as have many others. A short list can be found at the home page of the Bitcoin Humanitarian Alliance, a group of a dozen nonprofits doing human-rights and humanitarian work using Bitcoin as a means to receive donations, store funds, make payroll, and evade tyrants.14
Freedom Money
Bitcoin is growing. The trend is not just reflected in the stories told here; it is in the data. This summer, the Cornell Brooks School Tech Policy Institute began to roll out the Global Bitcoin Adoption Index, a research initiative surveying 25,000 individuals in 25 countries to assess the adoption of Bitcoin and stablecoins worldwide. The results are significant: In many large countries, including backsliding democracies and autocracies such as India, Kenya, Nigeria, Russia, and Turkey, more than a quarter of citizens report using or having at one point used Bitcoin.15 This amounts to tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people. The adoption curve resembles the internet adoption curve somewhere around the late 1990s, when many people in countries like the United States used the internet but were still using dial-up modems, and the iPhone was still a decade away.
Bitcoin conferences are sprouting up all over the developing world, from Southeast Asia to Africa to Latin America, all packed with Bitcoin users from dozens of authoritarian countries. Educational materials are better, more widespread, and available in more languages than ever before. Applications provide better user experience, more options, and more connectivity to the wider financial system. Thanks to the advent of innovations such as Lightning and eCash, the privacy of Bitcoin users can be more secure than ever. And thanks to Square’s upgrade enabling its four-million readers to accept Bitcoin and the clever integrations from apps such as Kenya’s Tando and Costa Rica’s Bitcoin Jungle, tens of millions of people can spend Bitcoin in their local economies without trading it into fiat currency first.
Ecosystem supporters are growing, too. For example, the Reynolds Foundation is a new charity whose mission, in part, is to reduce the “democratic deficit” in philanthropy. According to their executives, only one dollar of every hundred spent globally on philanthropic causes goes toward civil liberties and democracy work. And of that one dollar, fewer than ten cents are spent inside authoritarian regimes. If the Reynolds Foundation and others are successful in fixing this deficit and shifting the world’s philanthropy more toward supporting freedom, then they are going to need the right tools to do the job — which is why they have started to make significant grants to organizations such as OpenSats that are building out Bitcoin infrastructure globally.16
Soon, all serious grant-makers will be using Bitcoin — perhaps not for every gift, but for grants that need to go fast, where other money just cannot go — especially to power the individuals doing democracy work in difficult political environments. Just as human-rights activists took Twitter from niche to global through events such as the Arab Spring, human-rights activists may play a similar vanguard role in mainstreaming Bitcoin use. If we look at the adoption of encrypted-private-messaging (Signal, WhatsApp) by activists, which was rare in 2010 but nearly ubiquitous by 2020, we could reasonably speculate that Bitcoin, which was just beginning to take off among activists in 2020, will be a standard currency for human-rights activism and beyond by 2030.
Governments, for their part, are making Bitcoin adoption for nonprofits easier. Some, including the United States, are swept up in the idea of “strategic Bitcoin reserves,” where governments may accumulate Bitcoin to complement reserves of commodities such as gold and oil. Others are interested in using Bitcoin as a neutral trade currency or a way to convert energy reserves into capital. Even leaders who do not want their populations using Bitcoin as currency, such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, are normalizing Bitcoin in culture through their words and actions.
Peaceful transitions are much more effective than violent ones, and we have never seen anything like Bitcoin’s peaceful global protest. One just needs to look at exchange filings (Coinbase alone reported more than a hundred-million users, many of them Bitcoin users, in 2025), the tens of millions of self-custodial wallet downloads and more than ten-million cold-storage devices sold to understand that the shift away from using traditional money toward Bitcoin is probably the biggest peaceful protest in history.17 The most interesting part is that it is a quiet, uncoordinated action that is much less risky than going out onto the streets.
Every day, Bitcoin’s reach inspires, even in the darkest of places. It has helped people to survive under siege in Aleppo; kept families afloat in Lebanon; gotten aid into Gaza, Burma, and Sudan; and even helped to rescue North Korean refugees stuck in northeastern China. Bitcoin is providing property rights, connecting people to the world, and keeping resistance alive — often in places where nothing else can reach. In January 2009, when Bitcoin launched, Satoshi Nakamoto may have never guessed where the invention would lead. But today, we can say at the very least, it has earned the name “freedom money.” 
NOTES
1. Ruslan Shaveddinov, post on X, 16 June 2023, https://x.com/rshaveddinov/status/1934611966720385521.
2. See https://hrf.org/.
3. Mohamed Keita and Alex Gladstein, “Macron Isn’t So Post-Colonial After All,” Foreign Policy, 3 August 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/08/03/macron-france-cfa-franc-eco-west-central-africa-colonialism-monetary-policy-bitcoin/.
4. See https://afrobitcoin.org/.
5. Alex Gladstein, “Inside Cuba’s Bitcoin Revolution,” Bitcoin Magazine, 11 August 2021, https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/cubas-bitcoin-revolution.
6. Cuba Bitcoin (@Cuba_BTC), X, https://x.com/Cuba_BTC.
7. See https://edu.myfirstbitcoin.io/.
8. Steven Levy, “E-Money (That’s What I Want),” Wired, 1 December 1994, https://www.wired.com/1994/12/emoney/; Alex Gladstein, “Can Fedimints Help Bitcoin Scale to the World?” Bitcoin Magazine, 26 July 2022, https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/will-fedimints-bring-bitcoin-to-the-world.
9. “Is Bitcoin Good for Democracy?” Journal of Democracy, https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/news-and-updates/is-bitcoin-good-for-democracy/.
10. Human Rights Foundation, CBDC Tracker, https://cbdctracker.hrf.org/home.
11. Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, Cambridge Digital Mining Industry Report: Global Operations, Sentiment, and Energy Use, Cambridge Judge Business School, April 2025, https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/faculty-research/centres/alternative-finance/publications/cambridge-digital-mining-industry-report/; U.S. Energy Information Administration, “What is U.S. electricity generation by energy source?” Frequently Asked Questions, U.S. Department of Energy, https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3.
12. HRF Bitcoin Webinar Sign Up Form, Google Forms, Survey Form: Bitcoin in Africa, https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf0sjqwSFQo8HGMsWIIDRyhx34TsoonOSTfYoWSy-aaBbLeSw/viewform.
13. Alex Gladstein, “Can Nostr Make Twitter’s Dreams Come True?” Reason, 13 August 2024, https://reason.com/2024/08/13/can-nostr-make-twitters-dreams-come-true/.
14. See https://bitcoinhumanalliance.org/.
15. Sarah Kreps, “Announcing the Global Bitcoin Adoption Index,” Oslo Freedom Forum, YouTube, 5 June 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdz43OknQ7A.
16. See https://opensats.org/.
17. Jonathan Stempel, Hannah Lang, and John Mccrank “US Tightens Crackdown on Crypto with Lawsuits Against Coinbase, Binance,” Reuters, 7 June 2023, https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-sec-sues-coinbase-over-failure-register-2023-06-06/.
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