Cryptocurrency: SPLC Says Dollar Is Used For Hate, Ban It

[grarpamp]

Bitcoin Unbound: When Freedom Money Is Used For Hate

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-unbound-freedom-money-for-hate

Bitcoin’s technological innovation is available for anyone to use,
even bigots; but this shouldn’t sully the entire network’s
reputation...

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) issued a new report on the use
of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies by white supremacists and
far-right extremists. In the report, Megan Squire, senior fellow for
data analytics, and senior investigative reporter Michael Edison
Hayden, link 600 addresses to white supremacists, estimating they hold
“tens of millions of dollars” worth of value. Kevin Collier and Brandy
Zadrozny, writing for NBC News, then picked up the story, running with
the headline, “Bitcoin Surge Was A Windfall For White Supremacists,
Research Finds.”

Bitcoiners know what to do: take a deep breath. Let the FUD flow
through you. Maintain stoic equanimity. For more than a decade, the
media has tarred this open-source protocol, and those of us who use
it, by association with all manner of evil: money laundering, tax
evasion, terrorist financing, ponzi scamming, and my personal
favorite, the boiling of oceans. Such poorly-argued and ill-informed
attacks can be calmly dispatched or simply ignored. We stack sats. We
stay humble. It’s just another day in the life of a bitcoiner.

But this one hits differently. White supremacism is real, and it is
repugnant. For those of us in Portland, Oregon, hate groups regularly
march into our town and demonstrate, seeking out violent encounters on
the streets. For targeted individuals — which I am not — these groups
represent not only an attack on their personhood and dignity but a
threat to their safety and bodily integrity. So it’s hard to let this
particular story simply pass by without comment.

Neither the original report nor the subsequent NBC story provide
context for their findings.

Their point is simply that fringe political groups control 600
addresses and potentially tens of millions of dollars worth of bitcoin
and other cryptocurrencies. What they fail to mention, however, is
that there are more than 200 million non-empty bitcoin addresses
worldwide and nearly a trillion dollars of value in bitcoin.

That means these hate groups hold .0003% of addresses and at least
0.0001% of bitcoin’s value, a far less compelling headline.

Imagine Amazon stock ownership could be tracked on a public ledger and
some white supremacists were relatively early investors, now
constituting .0003% of shareholders. Would it taint the entire company
and all other shareholders? Would it merit a news story that made no
qualifications and provided no context? I think we know the answers.

Neither the original report nor the NBC story observes that the same
censorship resistance that makes bitcoin useful to hate groups in the
U.S. is also what allows it to support dissidents and oppressed
minorities from Palestine to Cuba to Nigeria to Belarus. Readers of
Bitcoin Magazine who follow the work of human rights activist Alex
Gladstein will be familiar with dozens of such examples. The SPLC
researchers do not track wallets of women in Afghanistan — nor should
they!— who were paid in bitcoin as far back as 2013. Their windfalls
allowed one to start a new life in Germany, another to pay her college
tuition in the U.S. The researchers do not track — nor should they! —
the wallets of the Feminist Coalition in Nigeria, whose bank accounts
were frozen, and who turned to bitcoin instead. The researchers do not
track — nor should they! — the wallets of Cuban bitcoiners, whose peso
has lost two thirds of its value since the end of 2020, and who,
without bitcoin, may have been unable to afford basic necessities.
Yet, without such tracking, the mere fact that 600 wallets are
controlled by white supremacists tells us nothing about who is
benefiting from bitcoin on the whole.

These researchers also seem unaware that bitcoin’s international usage
correlates with low national ratings of democracy, government
integrity, investment freedom, monetary freedom, and property rights.
Bitcoin thrives wherever money and good governance is failing. Turning
to the domestic scene, these researchers seem unaware that while only
11% of white Americans own cryptocurrencies, 23% of Black Americans
and 17% of Hispanic Americans do.

In sum, the “windfall” accruing to a handful of white supremacists in
the U.S. also lifted millions worldwide. But instead of any attempt to
see how bitcoin is being used more broadly, the identities behind 600
wallets are used to besmirch bitcoin itself – and others who’d use it
– while the remaining 199,999,400 wallets are ignored.

The NBC story does, at least, frankly acknowledge how easy it is to
track payments simply by pairing social-media-posted addresses with
on-chain transactions: “The list of 600 addresses we analyzed is just
a big list that I made of who owns what, and the way that we get those
is just watching these guys tell each other where to send the money,”
Squire said. “It’s just literally just looking this stuff up on this
public ledger.” And isn't that kind of transparency novel and
refreshing? Especially when compared with the by-design opacity of
offshore shell companies and cold hard cash, neither of which lends
itself to this kind of investigative journalism? But the stories make
no mention of these alternatives.

The most glaring omission from a progressive Bitcoiner perspective is
any consideration of the actual currency with the closest ties to
white supremacism, namely, the U.S. dollar itself. The dollar’s value
accrued to whites first through violent conquest, then literal
enslavement, and thereafter, by Jim Crow segregation, financial
redlining, and mass incarceration. To focus on the use of 600 bitcoin
addresses by white supremacists while ignoring this shameful, systemic
legacy of racism betrays a disturbing lack of perspective.

Neither the racist history of the dollar nor the revolutionary
potential of bitcoin is, of course, lost on Black Bitcoiners. Dawdu M.
Amantanah, in “Closing The Wealth Gap: Black America And Bitcoin
Adoption,” highlights Bitcoin’s decentralization, which means the
monetary network, unlike traditional banking, offers financial
inclusion, and the promise of financial freedom, to all. As Twitter
persona Lawrence Douglas, aka @AxeCapYa, who publishes a newsletter
called “Black And Bullish,” explains, “Bitcoin is the first asset that
allows the average citizen to participate in a global financial system
on equal footing. Its low barrier of entry allows bitcoin to transform
the financial lives of those that choose to adopt it as a long-term
store of value.”

Black bitcoin is its own universe with books like “Bitcoin And Black
America” by Isaiah Jackson, “Bitcoin And Black Powernomics,” by Will
Hobdy, and “From Bars to Bitcoin” by Justin Rhedrick, as well as
websites, Twitter spaces, Clubhouse chat rooms, podcasts, clubs,
newsletters, fin-tech apps, and conferences. This burgeoning world,
created entirely by and for Black investors is aimed at financial
education and entrepreneurship, encouraging Black ownership through
bitcoin and cryptocurrency. SPLC and NBC fail to acknowledge its
existence.

It must be said that certain corners of the Bitcoin community are, in
fact, bigoted in a variety of ways. I have witnessed instances of it
myself. And we must all, always condemn such bigotry when encountered,
simply as a matter of decency and humanity. Something similar was true
in the early days of the internet, when neo-Nazis recruited on online
bulletin boards. As a percentage, white supremacy groups probably
marred the internet to a greater degree then, than they pollute the
Bitcoin blockchain now, and in fact, such online recruiting is still a
problem. YouTube and Facebook algorithms have probably done as much as
anything to radicalize segments of our society. Yet few are calling
for a shutdown of the internet or shaming all its users because it is
a neo-Nazi recruiting tool. Instead, we recognize the issue’s inherent
difficulty: there are unavoidable tradeoffs between freedom of
expression, utility, and safety, and we recognize, too, the perils of
designating and empowering authorities on the matter of what speech
should and should not be permitted by global networks of
communication.

Perhaps it is too much to ask for subtlety, for complexity, in an era
of clicks. But the real issue here is whether, on balance, the
benefits of bitcoin's censorship resistance outweigh the negative
consequences of bitcoin being spent in odious ways and accrued by
nefarious characters. Here lies a deep philosophical question about
the proper reach and limits of our rights to property and exchange, as
well as an empirical question about what positive and negative
outcomes are enabled by Bitcoin’s technology. Absent proper
comparisons, absent context about the network as a whole, absent
imagination about the possibilities for bitcoin ranging across the
whole moral spectrum, we're left with an icky feeling, but nothing of
substance. Maybe that was the point.