Bitcoin Journal
The 30,000-Foot View of the Oslo Freedom Discussion board
As I step onto the airplane leaving Gardermoen Airport in Oslo, Norway, the burden and heat of the previous week settles into my chest.
The Oslo Freedom Discussion board will not be a convention. It’s not a summit. It’s one thing more durable to call and even more durable to explain — a convergence of braveness, reality and defiance that burns by means of the noise of the fashionable world and provides you no selection however to pay attention, really feel and act.
For the second time, I go away this metropolis extra satisfied than ever that one thing unstoppable is rising. That amid the censorship, surveillance and state repression spreading throughout the globe, there’s a countervailing power rooted in humanity, accelerated by know-how and led by those that’ve already paid the worth for talking out.
The Discussion board doesn’t commerce in empty optimism. It delivers a unique form of hope, solid from lived expertise and stitched collectively by individuals who have been in the dead of night and nonetheless select to see the sunshine. A hope borne from the tales of people who’ve lived by means of the worst an authoritarian regime can do and nonetheless select to battle for the liberty of others. The experiences shared had been exhausting. At instances, devastating. However they weren’t supplied for pity. They had been calls to motion.
Simply days after she was kidnapped, blindfolded, tortured, and sexually assaulted in a Tanzanian jail cell, Agather Atuhaire stood in entrance of a crowd of strangers and instructed her story.
Her voice didn’t tremble.
The Ugandan journalist and lawyer had traveled to Tanzania in solidarity with fellow East African dissidents, solely to be disappeared in a black van alongside Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi.
And but, towards all odds, she got here again. Not simply to her residence in Uganda, but in addition to the stage in Oslo, the place she spoke calmly and clearly about what it means to inform the reality below a dictatorship.
Her presentation, “The Digital Free Speech Crackdown in Uganda,” laid naked the authoritarian playbook: social media blackouts, propaganda campaigns, surveillance of journalists and the gradual monetary asphyxiation of unbiased media. When the federal government doesn’t like a narrative, it merely blocks the platform or web site. When a journalist digs too deep, they disappear for some time. Or endlessly. Atuhaire painted an image many battle to even think about.
And but, after every little thing, she didn’t simply recount these struggles. She seemed out on the crowd and thanked the open supply builders and contributors who write code and create instruments that make it potential for activists like her to talk, transfer cash and set up below regimes that need them silenced, or worse.
(Ugandan journalist and lawyer, Agather Atuhaire, speaks in the course of the Freedom Tech monitor on the 2025 Oslo Freedom Discussion board.)
From Iran, unbiased Bitcoin educator Ziya Sadr reminded us that monetary privateness will not be a luxurious however a needed lifeline for these going through the monetary repression by oppressive rulers. Sadr’s detainment in the course of the 2022 Ladies, Life, Freedom motion following the homicide of Mahsa Amini by the Iranian regime is a testomony to that. With out monetary privateness, activists’ actions, connections and funds are uncovered to a regime geared up with widespread monetary controls and a complicated, restrictive web firewall that rivals even China’s.
The consequence is without doubt one of the most repressive digital environments on the planet. And if that wasn’t sufficient, the Iranian rial foreign money has misplaced greater than 80% of its worth in just some years.
Towards this backdrop, Iranians are utilizing bitcoin as undebasable financial savings, and to purchase digital companies like VPNs as a way to entry the open web. However even that act, simply reaching the skin world, requires a degree of privateness most of us take without any consideration.
In his presentation, “Securing Lifelines: The Bitcoin Privateness Crucial,” Sadr shared that many Iranians flip to Bitcoin Coinjoins, a privateness method that breaks the hyperlink between Bitcoin transaction inputs. Coinjoins protect person transaction privateness and, extra importantly, protect Iranians from the surveillance and retaliation of a regime who punishes anybody attempting to entry data past its tightly managed digital areas. The usage of Coinjoins is turning into tougher as international authorized stress mounts towards open supply builders, and within the aftermath of the Samourai developer arrests, privateness protocols like Whirlpool are unworkable.
As we speak, Sadr is studying extra about further Bitcoin privateness instruments, together with Payjoin, a privateness methodology that enables two customers to contribute an enter to a Bitcoin transaction. Payjoin breaks widespread chain evaluation heuristics and conceals the sender and receiver of a transaction in addition to the fee quantity. Then there’s ecash, a type of digital money backed by Bitcoin that allows very personal, on a regular basis funds with the custodial trade-off of trusting mints (entities that challenge and redeem ecash tokens) to retailer person funds.
The continued growth of those protocols is essential for Iranians, who stay below a authorities that not solely tracks and surveils digital conduct, but in addition imposes automated fines on girls for violating hijab guidelines and manipulates foreign money change charges to revenue off residents’ financial savings. For tens of millions in Iran, bitcoin provides a final line of protection towards a collapsing foreign money, intrusive surveillance and whole monetary repression.
(Unbiased Iranian Bitcoin educator, Ziya Sadr, speaks in the course of the Freedom Tech monitor on the Oslo Freedom Discussion board.)
Venezuelan opposition chief Leopoldo López took the stage on the 2025 Oslo Freedom Discussion board not as a politician, however as a witness to what occurs when a state turns its establishments into additional tendrils of its repression machine.
After Nicolás Maduro stole Venezuela’s 2024 elections, López watched hundreds of his fellow folks — activists, college students, journalists, opposition members and attorneys — get arrested, disappeared or compelled into exile. The regime blocked entry to social media, revoked passports, criminalized dissent and used the monetary system as a method of controlling the inhabitants.
Amid this digital repression and Venezuela’s 162% inflation price, López sees bitcoin (decentralized cash) and Nostr (decentralized social media) as lifelines. When dictators shut down the web or freeze your checking account, alternate options which can be open supply, decentralized, uncensorable and accessible turn out to be extra necessary than ever for the survival of democracy and freedom.
“Decentralized resistance is the convergence of individuals, Bitcoin, Nostr, and AI.
Individuals, it’s in regards to the heart and the tip of what we’re doing.
Courageous men and women who sacrifice their freedom, who take dangers, who’re keen to battle for different folks.
If it’s not about folks, know-how wouldn’t be one thing value combating for.
Bitcoin is freedom cash. It’s decentralized, no one controls it, no one can cease it, it might probably transfer round with out borders.”
(Venezuelan Opposition Chief Leopoldo López in the course of the Freedom Tech monitor on the 2025 Oslo Freedom Discussion board.)
For many years, Paraguay’s biggest pure useful resource, hydroelectric energy, has flowed in a foreign country by means of worldwide contracts, fueling growth in neighboring international locations like Brazil and Argentina whereas one in 4 Paraguayans remained trapped in poverty. Paraguay’s Itaipu Dam, one of many largest on the planet, has lengthy symbolized this paradox: a river of vitality diverted away from the very individuals who want it most.
Björn Schmidtke and Delia Garcete of Penguin Group are flipping that script.
In a landmark transfer, they secured Paraguay’s first 100-megawatt energy buy settlement, marking the start of a daring experiment to reclaim that vitality for the folks of Paraguay. As a substitute of promoting it off to international powers, they use it to mine Bitcoin — and the proceeds go to Paraguay’s youth.
(Itaipu dam, Paraguay)
Out of the warmth of buzzing ASICs and the roar of the Itaipu generators rises Penguin Academy, a free software program growth faculty that equips younger Paraguayans with coding, growth and technical abilities. Over 10,000 college students have utilized, together with 800 girls; greater than 3,000 have already graduated. And over 85% of the graduates from their Code Professional program now work within the tech business.
What was as soon as wasted or exported is now being reworked into freedom and a future. By means of bitcoin, Paraguay’s stranded vitality is discovering its means residence.
Rushan Abbas is a Uyghur activist who has spent years elevating the alarm in regards to the Chinese language Communist Celebration’s marketing campaign to erase her folks. In the course of the Freedom Tech monitor, she spoke not simply as a human rights advocate however as a sister whose sibling, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, was kidnapped by the CCP in 2018 and hasn’t been heard from since. Her voice was calm, however her phrases had been heavy.
Abbas described a area became a digital and bodily jail. The Uyghur homeland, East Turkistan, has been deliberately reworked into one of many world’s most subtle police states, the place mass surveillance, facial recognition programs, police checkpoints, asset seizure, organized marriage, sterilization and compelled labor are used not simply to regulate the Uyghur inhabitants, however to suppress them out of existence.
As Rushan describes it: “Break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins.”
Rushan made clear that financial management is central to the CCP’s technique. Uyghurs have their belongings and financial institution accounts frozen, their land seized and their properties stolen. They’re stripped of any capability to save lots of,…
