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CANADA AND U.S. CRACKDOWNS DRAWING CRYPTO RESPONSE. Government attempts in Canada to strangle fundraising for the trucker’s Freedom Convoy has caught the attention of the crypto world, along with anyone holding money in banks.
It’s now a fact of life in the faux democracies of the West that governments will smear virtually any protest or dissident voice opposing their illegal power abuses, as terrorists and/or Russian agents.
The Canada truckers have been accused of both. Justin Trudeau used the charges as a pretext to unleash the never before utilized Emergencies Act.
The truckers and their supporters in fact represent a politically wide range of average Canadians who don’t want to be forced to take medical treatments: in this case, the experimental gene level treatments deceptively called “vaccines.”
By Friday, lead organizers including Tamara Lich and Chris Barber were arrested.
Bank accounts connected with the protest and protesters had already been seized earlier in the week. Coincidentally, multiple Canadian banks closed for a period the following day. Some pointed out that seizure of bank accounts is something that wouldn’t exactly encourage citizens to keep extra money lying around in them.
Cryptos Figure Into Protests
Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland claimed that as part of Emergency Act powers, “crypto wallets” of protesters have been frozen:
“The names of both individuals and entities, as well as crypto wallets, have been shared by the RCMP with financial institutions and accounts have been frozen, and more accounts will be frozen.”
Freeland likely meant “custodial wallets,” or crypto held on centralized exchanges. Non-custodial, or Crypto held directly by users via secret phrases, with wallet addresses on the blockchain, cannot be “frozen” by authorities, though it is possible to trace transactions from or to an address that has been tied to a person or group.
Some privacy focused cryptos like Monero and ZCash make it nearly impossible to trace transactions.
Nicholas Anthony of the Cato Institute told FOX Business that the Canadian government’s seizure of bank accounts and crypto wallets (or at least “custodial” wallets on centralized crypto exchanges) is a worrying government overreach that could be tried in the U.S.
Of course, it basically already has, against some January 6 protesters.
“I think this really needs to be an eye opener for Americans across the country, across political ideologies,” Anthony commented.
He said Canada’s actions are a ploy “reserved for authoritarian regimes” to punish citizens who dissent against government policies.
Before the bank freezes, the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe drew scorn a few weeks ago for freezing donations to the Freedom Convoy, then saying it would give the money instead to selected “worthy” charities.
GiveSendGo, an alternative Christian based funding platform accepted a campaign to fund the trucker protest. Another controversy ensued after the platform was hacked and names of donors were released, almost half of who hailed from the U.S..
Government allied media in Canada and the U.S. happily jumped in and published the hacked information. Twitter allowed names to be posted.
Even Democrat Minnesota Senator Ilhan Omar, no ally of the protest, called the publicizing of the hacked info “unconscionable.”
The Canadian government has also been pursuing crypto donations, though depending on the cryptos and methods used, that nut is harder to crack.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Biden administration is on the edge of announcing its own crackdown on cryptos, following regulations enacted last year that now allow the government to snoop on smaller amounts of money held in banks and with payment vendors like PayPal.
Noble sounding excuses like combating “terrorism,” ransomware, child trafficking and drug money laundering have been provided as reasons for the abusive invasion and surveillance.
But the fact that the Biden administration is doing laughably little to stem either poisonous fentanyl drug running or human trafficking on U.S. borders speaks volumes about its real intents with crypto.
More people are waking up to the fact that governments in the dawning age of cryptos are after two things when it comes to money: (1) they’re out to protect their monopoly, so they can continue siphoning wealth to enrich themselves and their elite cohorts; and (2) they’re out to control mediums of value more comprehensively, to help crush unwanted dissent.
The crypto space has been reacting to the moves by Trudeau and Biden. Many are becoming reacquainted with some of the original underlying motivations for the creation of cryptos and decentralized blockchains: resistance to wholesale stealing of wealth by elites that characterized the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
Barry Silbert, famed crypto billionaire, has indicated that the government crackdowns are showing the need not only for bitcoin, but more stringent privacy coins like ZCash.
Silbert is the founder and CEO of Digital Currency Group (DCG), a conglomerate that includes Grayscale, which oversees $28 billion worth of Bitcoin, Ether and other assets, according to Forbes.
On 17 Feb, following a retweet that condemned Trudeau’s actions, Silbert tweeted: “Every investor should have 5% of their crypto portfolio in privacy-focused coins.”
Silbert was already known for his crypto privacy views, having previously made a large investment in ZCash, though the coin has dropped precipitously in value from its 2017 highs.
Silbert has also been retweeting messages of others supporting privacy and protest rights, including this one by Andreas M. Antonopoulos, a noted expert and proselytizer for permissionless blockchains:
“Privacy is a human right! It is also the fountainhead for all other human rights. Without financial privacy, we don’t have human rights.”
Meanwhile, the CEO of Kraken, a major centralized cryptocurrency exchange, actually advocated that crypto holders take their holdings off such exchanges.
Jesse Powell advised people to move their assets to non-custodial crypto wallets, where governments could not easily get at them.
Powell made his comments in response to questions about whether crypto exchanges would freeze people’s crypto at the request of police, even without judicial consent, according to theBlockCrypto.com.
Powell indicated that kind of scenario was inevitable.
“100% yes it has/will happen and 100% yes, we will be forced to comply. If you’re worried about it, don’t keep your funds with any centralized/regulated custodian. We cannot protect you.”
He said that concerned users should not only get their coins off centralized exchanges, but should only trade “peer-to-peer”, or directly with other crypto owners using direct crypto addresses.
But even that avenue proved problematic for the Trucker’s Freedom Convoy, when they publicly advertised a bitcoin address to which to send crypto donations.
Alex Gladstein of the Human Rights Foundation called the move a mistake, since it allowed federal authorities to blacklist that address and others associated with it.
Gladstein drew a parallel to a recent abuse of so-called “anti-terrorism laws” in Myanmar, where two young women have been imprisoned for donating to refugees. Gladstein noted:
“These two college students have been sentenced to seven years in prison in Myanmar for violating an ‘Anti-Terrorism Law’ after their donations to refugees were divulged to the military junta.
“This is what happens when a society has no financial privacy.”
This past Friday, none other than Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin weighed in with a mixed view of the trucker protest.
In an interview given during the ETHDenver conference, Buterin, who was raised in Canada, said that while he didn’t condone some of the tactics of protesters, government financial moves against them were “dangerous.”
“If the truckers are blocking the roads and that’s breaking the economy, fine, blocking the roads is illegal and there are laws against that,” he told crypto outlet CoinDesk. But he added:
“If the government is not willing to follow the laws … [and] give people a chance to defend themselves…and they just want to talk to the banks and basically cut out people’s financial livelihoods without due process, that is an example of the sort of thing that decentralized technology is there to make more difficult.”
BITCOIN OFFICIALLY INVITED TO INVADE UKRAINE. Zerohedge, smeared without evidence by the Biden Administration as a “Russian asset” this past week, kept on trucking with breaking news.
One item of note: Ukraine’s parliament approved a bill that legalizes bitcoin.
The new law doesn’t make the leading crypto legal tender. But it assures citizens that they can buy and hold bitcoin legally.
“The new law is an additional opportunity for business development in our
Country,” said Mykhaylo Fedorov, Ukrainian minister of digital transformation. “Foreign and Ukrainian crypto companies will be able to operate legally, and Ukrainians will have convenient and secure access to the global market for virtual assets.”
The bill specifies regulations that Bitcoin exchanges and other service providers need to abide by in order to legally operate in the country.
It also lays out regulation by Ukraine’s National Securities Commission.
“The Law on Virtual Assets is largely a framework law and requires further substantial refinements, for instance, changes to the tax code,” said crypto industry mover Serhiy Tron.
Tron heads White Rock Management and the Parea Foundation international fund.
He told Bitcoin Magazine, “Nevertheless, the document became an important signal to the global community, since the National Bank of Ukraine officially stated that digital currency is a ‘monetary surrogate, which has no real value.’”
Blockchain Battles has addressed the question of the value of bitcoin and blockchains in articles including “WHAT IS THE VALUE OF CRYPTOS AND BLOCKCHAINS?” (15 Jun 2021) and “THE CRYPTO ‘AGE OF UTILITY’ HAS JUST BEGUN” (12 Oct 2021).
CANADIAN “CRYPTO” RUN ON BANKS. Canadians are reportedly removing money from bank accounts in reaction to the actions of the Canadian government.
Under the Emergency Powers Act invoked by President Justin Trudeau, the government has frozen bank accounts of peaceful Trucker Convoy protesters, and even family members not directly associated with the protests.
Graphs showing bank outages from late last week, released by UK economic writer James Melville, indicate a jump in banking activity.
According to Yahoo News, registered financial organizations in Canada were commanded by authorities to prohibit facilitating transactions across 34 crypto wallets associated with the trucker protest.
With Canadians apparently flocking to Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies, the government may try to exert added restrictions on centralized crypto exchanges, to try to limit Canadian citizens from moving money from fiat to crypto.