In a recent broadcast of the 2020 Latin American Bitcoin & Blockchain Conference, Alex Gladstein argued that Bitcoin serves a critical purpose as a “humanitarian defense system.”
His presentation focused on surveillance states and how people gladly trade their digital privacy for convenience. “A lot of times, you do it to yourself,” he stated than being forced by a government, but it is gearing surveillance capitalism.
“It’s really this trade-off that you willingly make, where you give up some of your privacy and freedom for convenience, speed, and comfort,” he explained. “That is a trade-off that I think Bitcoin can fight.”
He pointed to China’s surveillance state’s immense growth and reputation-based “social credit system,” which steadily comes to life. He noted that China is expected to have 500M surveillance cameras in 2021 to monitor a population of 1.4B people. “They have this sense of omniscience that would make Orwell blush,” said Gladstein.
This system thrives on data that people give whether they use digital money and financial services. It includes using the famous messaging app WeChat for all purchases and banking services. The downside of convenience, with this instance, is the potential impact that a low social credit rating could have on things ranging from securing a loan to get to schools or being denied rights based on the background, beliefs, or behavior.
“What the government wants to do is make what they call a harmonious society, but the reality is, there’s no such thing as a harmonious society,” Gladstein explained, indicating to the widespread reports of at least a million Uyghurs, an ethnic minority, being held in prison camps in China. “When they try to smooth everything out and make everything look perfect, what they actually do is crush a lot of people underneath.”
Gladstein believes that a critical part in slowing the increased centralization of data is to evade payment methods that loop in third parties, like credit cards and typical mobile payments platforms. With the use of cash and coins, merchants won’t know anything about you, and it worked out in the past. However, the world is changing quickly, and cash usage is down remarkably.
“Could we have a different kind of cashless society? Are a decentralized financial system without third parties and controlling authorities possible?” he said, pivoting to Bitcoin. “In this peer-to-peer electronic cash system, we have our defense system. We have our way that we’re going to defend humanity.”
Gladstein advised that in the future, historians will look back at Bitcoin’s decentralization of money as being as important as democracy’s decentralization of government and the internet’s decentralization of information.
“Bitcoin can’t be censored, easily mass surveilled, devalued, monopolized by corporations, or stopped at borders,” he added. “No matter if you’re a billionaire or one of these corporations that’s buying up a ton of Bitcoin right now, they can’t change the rules,” he said. “They can’t prevent me from using Bitcoin. They can’t prevent you from using Bitcoin. So this monetary network is, I think, a humanitarian defense system in many different ways.”
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