CoinJoins Help Democracy Protests
(originally in Forbes)
Inspired by
@HRF and
@gladstein
Hundreds of activists around the world use bitcoin for its censorship resistance properties — rather than speculative trading. From Nigeria to Russia, activists across the globe see bitcoin as a tool for promoting pro-democracy protests despite financial repression.
Financial repression and nonviolent resistance in a variety of dictatorships were a few of the topics of discussion at the Human Rights Foundation’s Global BitcoinBitcoin -1.1% Summit on Thursday, October 3. Protests usually need money to function, and so seizing cash and freezing bank accounts is an effective way to neutralize citizens’ ability to fight back against dictators before they can become too organized. Often this financial repression is enough to force the end of the protests, due to the difficulty of organizing protests without any money, and organizers’ uncertainty about their survival without financial access.
Bitcoin cannot be seized, because it is not a physical asset residing in space. It is a digital asset, residing at an address in the bitcoin blockchain. In order to use bitcoin, one need only have a 64-character private key to that address, or a 12-word (or 24-word) phrase associated with a wallet. Private keys are too long to memorize for most people, but a piece of paper on which a private key is written is much easier to hide than physical cash. Bitcoin also cannot be frozen, because there are no authorities on the Bitcoin network that have the power to block or stop transactions. Even if there is an address that a person wants to stop from transacting on the bitcoin network, there is nothing they can do about it.
These features of bitcoin are often fretted over by American authorities bemoaning their inability to prevent foreign adversaries from transacting using bitcoin, despite the American authorities’ best efforts to sanction them. But of course, a network that resists censorship by foreign authorities of necessity resists censorship by American authorities. This is a price we must be willing to pay for the sake of democratic activists worldwide. According to the Varieties of Democracy Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, 5.7 billion people – 72% of the world’s population – live under authoritarian rule.
When financial repression fails, dictators turn to the second tactic – arrests, often followed by torture. One might think that using bitcoin makes it difficult to find those responsible through the protests – at least through their financial transactions. But this isn’t the case. Bitcoin transactions are recorded on the ledger, and the ledger is public. Anyone can download it, view it, and analyze it. And while the ledger doesn’t contain people’s identities or locations, it is subject to analysis and often yields identifying information. This, of course, can be disastrous for anti-authoritarian pro-democracy protesters and activists. The greater the resources of the dictatorship, the greater the risk of using bitcoin. It’s better than banks, to be sure, but it’s a risk nonetheless.
There are ways to make bitcoin transactions more private. One is CoinJoins. In a CoinJoin, users jointly construct transactions where their coins are combined and then sent out to various addresses. None of the destination addresses is connected to any of the originating addresses. Nobody knows who else is CoinJoining with them. Since it is an automatic protocol, no coordinating authority has custody of the bitcoin involved; each user retains control of their own coins throughout.
Because of CoinJoins, a person can send money to an activist or protestor without anyone knowing who sent it. A Russian national can send bitcoin to the Anti-Corruption Foundation through a CoinJoin without Putin’s government knowing – even if Putin’s government knows who the originating address belongs to and who the final destination address belongs to. Of course, in such cases, multiple rounds of CoinJoining is advisable.
Because of the censorship-resistance of bitcoin, it is a favorite tool of protestors. But it is not private enough to make them comfortable that they won’t be identified and arrested. So they turn to the privacy-preserving features of CoinJoins.
CoinJoins enable pro-democracy protesters fighting against dictators to use censorship-resistant money – bitcoin – more privately. People can hide their identities from those hunting them. This is something that should be encouraged and supported. But some governments – democratic governments, even – have taken a different view. They’ve said that CoinJoins violate anti-money-laundering rules. The U.S. government arrested the developers of a privacy-focused wallet called Samourai Wallet that used CoinJoins by default, charging them with having “facilitated more than $100 million in money laundering transactions from illegal dark web markets.”
But cybersecurity, AML, anti-terrorism laws are used by authoritarian goverments to target pro-democracy activists or opposition leaders, says the Open Dialogue Foundation. For example, Erdogan’s government recently arrested a Turkish student on terrorism charges for participation in religious services. India arrested leaders of the Aam Aadmi opposition party for supposed financial crimes. Azerbaijan arrested opposition leader Gubad Ibadoghlu for production, acquisition or sale of counterfeit money. In Venezuela, presidential candidate Edmundo Gonzalez has been arrested for terrorism after an election he claims he won. Tunisian opposition leader Lotfi Mraihi was arrested on suspicion of money-laundering.
Leave aside the fact that the Samourai developers built a non-custodial wallet, never taking custody of any user funds, and so weren’t transmitting money. The fact remains that CoinJoins are a vital tool for human rights and pro-democracy protests in dictatorial regimes. Alex Gladstein of the Human Rights Foundation estimates that “dozens of protest movements on five continents impacting millions of people since 2020 have used bitcoin as part of pro-democracy protests.” He adds that “HRF supports Bitcoin privacy tools and recognizes the power of privacy-preserving collaborative transactions for human rights defenders – especially ones operating under authoritarian regimes.” CoinJoins are morally neutral. Chainalysis estimates that in 2023 about $25 billion in value was used by illicit actors, and under $2 billion went through some mixing like CoinJoin.
CoinJoins provide privacy through obscurity, and so work best when there are a lot of people CoinJoining. The more developers, coordinators, and users there are, the more privacy protesters can achieve. Most Americans are not on the ground protesting against dictators, but we can help the cause by coordinating CoinJoins and CoinJoining ourselves. Democratic governments could encourage that as a way of peacefully exporting democracy without costing any tax dollars.
