The Oslo Freedom Forum welcomes activists from all over the world.
Human Rights Activists Meet with Bitcoin
Bitcoin
“Bitcoin has the potential to help so-called high-risk people in very practical ways,” Mogashni Naidoo, a Bitcoin user experience (UX) researcher at the Bitcoin Design Community, said in a presentation at the conference. “We believe that as we create these applications, we need to connect with people who actually use Bitcoin. [them]. “
Naidoo mentioned the process of interviewing users of the products she and her team design, such as a bitcoin wallet, before conceptualizing what the product will look like.
“If you come up with a solution before you really understand the problem, it’s just a hypothesis,” Naidoo added.
Seth for Privacy, head of marketing and strategy at bitcoin hardware wallet company Foundation, has taken a similar approach, attending the conference to get a better understanding of what activists need when it comes to bitcoin.
“It’s really exciting to have these conversations,” he said in an interview. “It helps expose people to problems on the ground that you don’t see in the bitcoin Twitter bubble or in these bitcoin enthusiast spaces.”
Bitcoin privacy advocate Seth “For Privacy,” as his pen name suggests, also said the conference reminded him that privacy needs to remain top of mind when designing new products.
“Seeing people who really need Bitcoin as freedom money is the best catalyst to think more deeply about Bitcoin privacy and evaluate where it is currently and how it can be improved,” he added.
Focus on privacy
Privacy in Bitcoin transactions was a hot topic at the event.
Following the U.S. Department of Justice’s arrest of the founder of Samurai Wallet, a privacy-focused bitcoin wallet, many conference attendees were concerned about the future of such technology.
Anna Chekhovich, financial director of Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, expressed concerns at the panel.
“Any chilling effect on Bitcoin developers would be damaging to freedom fighters around the world,” Chekhovich said.
Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), the organization that organizes the Oslo Freedom Forum, said the organization has long been committed to helping activists protect privacy.
“HRF’s focus on bitcoin has always included privacy,” Gladstein said in an interview. “Activists are constantly under scrutiny, so privacy is very important to us.”
He also spoke about how HRF has funded projects that help protect the privacy of bitcoin transactions, such as ecash protocol Cashu and bitcoin desktop wallet Sparrow Wallet.
“We are very proud to have supported many privacy technologies over the years,” Gladstein added.
The difficulty of teaching Westerners about Bitcoin
Many of the speakers at the event are from the Global South, including Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, and from authoritarian regimes, and they said they intuitively understand that bitcoin offers financial utility and access that isn’t available through their countries’ traditional currencies and financial systems.
This was in contrast to some of the participants from Western countries – jurisdictions with highly functioning financial systems and governed by democratically elected leaders – who still struggle to understand the need for something like Bitcoin.
“In African countries and other countries, people can get Bitcoin quickly, but in Western countries, it’s more difficult to educate them because they need tools that will help them send money around the country and freely pay for things that their governments may not want.” [them to pay for]Anita Posch, founder of Crack The Orange and Bitcoin For Fairness, said in an interview:
Posch has traveled to many African countries, including Zambia, Zimbabwe and Ghana, to educate activists and the general public about Bitcoin. He hosted multiple sessions at the Oslo Freedom Forum, where he consistently emphasized the fact that Bitcoin is an important tool for activists while sharing his knowledge on how he personally uses Bitcoin.
“It’s really important to spread the message that bitcoin is a tool for enforcing human rights,” she told me.
