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Comment by kokkis | Hacker News Reader

I'm building a financial censorship monitor at https://nofunds.org/, that tells a story of how money has been turned into a political weapon to silence journalists, activists, and civil society by freezing assets, blocking accounts, sanctioning, and banning payments. It's part of my master's thesis https://www.doria.fi/handle/10024/187407 and also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36430596, but now I wanted to make a more comprehensive list, using Claude API and manual work. I'm designing a website right now, and the site is live within 2 months (given the API rate limitations currently to process articles). I know Hacker News is quite critical of Bitcoin, but it's also worthy to warn that, indeed, Bitcoin is at least a marginal tool to those whose bank accounts may be endangered. I'm basically arguing that Bitcoin can be used to resist such financial censorship, deplatforming and so on.

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I built cross-border compliance Management info system dashboards at a Swiss private bank. The much more widespread reality is: entire nationalities and residencies get quietly moved to "do not serve" lists because the regulatory cost of serving them exceeds revenue. No public process, no appeal, no notice, you just can't open an account:financial exclusion most people never see.

That's also very interesting phenomenon. Instead of censoring after the bank accounts have been granted, one could also "censor" or rather exclude a person or group of people or an organisation by not granting a bank account in the first place. Quite shrewd, and extremely unnoticeable. I mean, whole nationalities are excluded based on quite absurd reasons. But I guess fear led to this in many ways.

Have you read or connected with Rainey Reitman, who just published the book Transaction Denied?

Hey, I haven't and that sounds very interesting to read in my case especially. I'll give it a look! Thanks mate.

this is interesting.

my hunch is that we're moving towards more surveillance, censorship and deplatforming in the future, and CBDCs are a major tool for that.

I like Bitcoin, despite its problems (price volatility and quantum vulnerability) but I think censorship-resistant stablecoins would be a better solution for people looking to protect themselves from Big Brother.

Shockingly bitcoin gained a lot more power for me when prominent government officials started using it to start operating outside the checks and balances of the banking system.

I saw Hong Kong launched stablecoin. How would it be less volatile than bitcoin?

Stablecoins are typically pegged to something, like USD or EUR, so their exchange rate vis-a-vis that currency is stable

Don't they sneeze peoples' Bitcoin just the same?

With Feds showing up with your door with guns and handcuffs, you'll have to hand over your private keys, and that's how they freeze BTC accounts. It's not particularly immune to the same threats.

Store your Bitcoin private key in a password manager. Would you really give out your keyvault master password to them?

It doesn't matter how it's stored if they have guns and handcuffs or any other form of $5 wrench (xkcd.com/538).

Yeah, that's the classic xkcd-reality. It will be a rather difficult to enforce that _en masse_. However, should that happen, then the money is the least of one's worries. In any case, financial censorship in that case would be the least of one's worries, if it comes down to such threats and physical violence.

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