A GoFundMe campaign raised more than £55,000 for a Gazan family trying to escape the war. Most of the money raised never reached them. Banking rules and sanctions prevent direct payouts in Gaza, so the funds had to go through an intermediary. When that arrangement collapsed, the family was left without the support raised for them. Bitcoin platforms like Agora and Geyser send funds directly to recipients’ own wallets, using community verification instead of giving control to a single intermediary. Read how these tools are helping people in crisis. My latest piece in Forbes featuring @Team Soapbox @Geyser @Lyudmyla Kozlovska @npub1zhqc...h0dw @Femi Longe .

Forbes

When The Financial System Can’t Reach People In Crisis, Bitcoin Can

Humanitarian crowdfunding can raise thousands in hours, but banking rules, sanctions and intermediaries may still stop the money reaching those in ...

When governments shut down your communications or a platform debanks you, what’s your backup plan? Listening to activists at the Oslo Freedom Forum describing surveillance, censorship and financial exclusion, one thing stood out. For nearly every problem they raised, builders were already working on solutions. It became the opening to my talk at @BTC Prague. In this clip, I explain why CBDCs may not arrive in the form people expect and why stablecoins can carry many of the same risks. Full video, article and practical tools linked below. Freedom depends on having money that no government, bank or platform can switch off. Bitcoin gives us that option.

What you can build in a week now is actually insane. I’ve prompt built a website and I’m blown away by what was possible. Everything I’ve done across Bitcoin, policy and journalism is now in one place. If you have time I would appreciate some feedback. What works? What doesn’t? What did I miss? Constructive criticism very welcome! Full website:

Susie Violet Ward, Journalist

Susie Violet Ward - Journalist

Independent reporting on Bitcoin, energy, technology and the future of money. Bylines in Forbes, City A.M. and Bitcoin Magazine.

Link also in bio! #ProofOfWork #Bitcoin

If it’s not “for the children,” it’s “national security.” FATF’s new roadmap calls for greater use of large datasets, real-time information sharing and closer cooperation between tech, telecoms and finance to tackle fraud. Traditional finance already collects vast amounts of identity and transaction data and serious financial crime continues at scale. The same approach is now being extended further, linking identity and financial activity across more systems. This turns law-abiding citizens into targets for both increased surveillance and physical attacks. My latest in Forbes.

Forbes

FATF’s Fraud Roadmap Expands Data Risks And Global Surveillance

FATF wants larger datasets and real-time information sharing to fight fraud, but surveillance heavy compliance has not reduced financial crime and ...

Global regulators built the FATF Travel Rule for a banking system still full of illicit finance. Now they are imposing the same surveillance architecture on Bitcoin. The rule was created by G7 countries through an unelected body in France. It was sold as a way to stop money laundering by forcing information to travel with every transaction. Decades later, the UN still estimates money laundering at 2 - 5% of global GDP. The model has failed in TradFi.

United Nations : Office on Drugs and Crime

Overview

Overview

Regulators now want to apply that same framework to Bitcoin, which is an open, auditable ledger with a completely different risk profile. Chainalysis’ 2026 Crypto Crime Report shows stablecoins accounted for 84% of illicit transaction volume in 2025, while Bitcoin is still being pulled into a surveillance regime designed for banks and centralised intermediaries and a financial system struggling to stop illicit finance at scale. https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2026-crypto-crime-report-introduction/ The Travel Rule forces firms to collect, hold and transmit personal information about the people behind transactions. This creates databases that link identity, transaction history and asset ownership in ways that expose ordinary users to hacks, targeting and physical security risks. FATF has updated it’s recommendations as part of a global push for payment transparency. As a result it is being expanded, embedded and normalised. This solves nothing but creates unprecedented harm by forcing more personal financial data to be collected, stored and shared. This clip is from the @You’re The Voice podcast with @Efrat Fenigson and Ben Samocha at Bitcoin Vegas last year. The warning has only grown more urgent. Bitcoin does not need TradFi’s failed surveillance architecture wrapped around it.

Jeremy Grantham’s latest CNBC comments are a perfect example of what happens when traditional finance tries to judge Bitcoin using an old framework. Had these comments been about crypto, I would have nodded along. Much of that market has proved to be speculative and altcoin season is not coming back. This was not a discussion about the crypto casino. He was speaking in front of a Bitcoin chart, while the segment drifted between 'crypto' and Bitcoin as though they were the same thing, which tells you how little precision sat behind the critique. Bitcoin deserves a more serious discussion than recycled talking points about crooks, dividends and supermarket payments. He called it a 'useless speculative mechanism' and said it would 'dwindle away' over decades, 'not with a bang but a whimper.' He asked why people do not use it to buy dinner or pay at the supermarket. Then came the line: “What it does is allows crooks to move money around without leaving a trace.” That is not dismissive… it’s wrong. It is not a stock, a company, or a bond. It does not have earnings, dividends, cash flow, a management team, or a board of directors, because it was not designed to be valued like those things. It is a decentralised monetary network with: - no CEO - no central bank - no political control - no bailouts - no off switch - a fixed 21 million supply that cannot be inflated on demand. The 'without leaving a trace' claim really misunderstands the system. Bitcoin is a public ledger and every base layer transaction is recorded. It is far more traceable than cash, which is why law enforcement, analytics firms and exchanges have spent years building tools around that transparency. The 'people don’t buy dinner with it' argument is also wrong and lazy. Gold is not judged by how often it is used at the supermarket. Bitcoin allows people to store and transfer value across borders, outside a system suffering from inflation, surveillance, debanking, capital controls and political discretion. Then there is proof of work, which Grantham dismissed as 'proof of unnecessary work.' That 'work' is what secures the network. It is what makes Bitcoin expensive to attack, impossible to rewrite and different from the thousands of tokens that can be changed, paused, printed or controlled by insiders. That is a stock market framework being applied to an open monetary protocol. Bitcoin has already survived bans, crashes, exchange failures, media attacks, regulatory assaults, energy panic, criminality narratives and repeated predictions of its death. That is not dwindling away. Grantham is not watching Bitcoin disappear, he is watching the old framework fail to explain it. So if the price worries you, remember what this actually is... A 17 year old monetary network separating money from state and challenging some of the oldest assumptions in finance. We are still early! Full article:

CNBC

Billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham says bitcoin will 'dwindle away with a whimper'

Jeremy Grantham renewed his long-running criticism of bitcoin, predicting it will gradually fade into irrelevance over decades.

Money detached from energy corrupts society. That is exactly what we are living through right now as endless money printing eats away at wages, destroys savings, funds government waste and moves wealth upwards. When money is broken the entire system built around it breaks too.  I love fairy lights and I think they are a beautiful use of energy because they bring joy, warmth and a little bit of magic.  Using energy to secure a global peer-to-peer money that anyone on Earth can use without needing government permission is one of the best uses of energy on the planet. Bitcoin achieves this through Proof of Work by tying money back to energy with a real cost which is exactly what makes it sound, permissionless and decentralised.  When money has a cost it cannot be printed endlessly by governments or banks so it forces discipline back into the system, reduces waste and malinvestment and helps people plan for the long term instead of being pushed into debt, speculation, and short term consumption.  Securing sound money through energy is not waste. It is one of the highest and most important uses of energy humanity can choose right now.

Hollywood loves a whistleblower story once the danger has passed. Eugene Jarecki’s The Six Billion Dollar Man arrives while the danger is still attached. Major platforms privately praised it … then said no. Now it’s bypassing them with Bitcoin and Nostr on June 27. My latest in Forbes featuring @Eugene Jarecki @jack Julian Assange @BTC Prague. Full article:

Forbes

The Julian Assange Film Streamers Wouldn’t Touch Turns To Bitcoin

A politically explosive Julian Assange documentary turns to Bitcoin and decentralized platforms in a fight over censorship, control and media gatek...

The UK's revolving door of prime ministers highlights a structural problem of chronic policy inconsistency and short termism. Persistent deficits, debt now around 95% of GDP and weak productivity have left successive governments with very little fiscal room. Governments too often behave as if the Laffer Curve is irrelevant, reaching for higher taxes while ignoring the point at which the tax base starts to shrink as capital, talent and businesses leave. Capital goes where it is treated best. The harder and more important work is supply side reform, fiscal credibility and productivity growth, but that has repeatedly been undermined by short political horizons. The speed of technological change, especially in finance and digital assets, only makes long term planning harder. Policy too often reflects well resourced lobbying rather than deep technical expertise. Without credible rules and a commitment to growth over short term fixes, any new prime minister will inherit the same constraints. https://www.ft.com/content/cd15556f-8f52-4b7a-8af9-578fdbbaa9c6?sharetype=blocked

This is another great advert for bitcoin, Nostr and separating money and state. Nobody serious thinks social media is creating a happy, healthy environment for children. The harms from addictive apps, algorithmic feeds, cyberbullying, adult content, predators, body image pressure, endless scrolling and destroyed attention spans are obvious. The problem is that banning things rarely works, especially when technology is moving faster than the digitally illiterate policy class trying to control it. This will push children onto VPNs, fake accounts, encrypted groups, offshore platforms, unregulated apps and darker corners of the internet where parents have even less visibility. It risks turning a difficult parenting problem into a surveillance and identity checking regime for everyone, while giving families the false comfort that the state has 'solved' something it barely understands. We have already seen this pattern with online age checks. The rules come in, VPN use surges, people route around the system, privacy gets weaker, and the children most at risk are driven further underground. Australia’s under 16 ban has already shown enforcement problems, with children learning how to evade the controls rather than becoming meaningfully safer. The really depressing part is how familiar this all feels. We have seen it in bitcoin policy for years. The people with the worst incentives, the least technical understanding and the biggest lobbying budgets somehow end up with the ear of government, while people who actually understand the technology are ignored. It is a total shit show. The answer is not more state control over speech, money, identity and childhood. The answer is better parenting, better tools, better communities, better education, and less blind faith in governments with a proven track record of making problems worse. Handing more power to the state every time society gets scared is how we sleepwalk into something far more dangerous. Critics have already warned about enforcement, privacy and children moving to less regulated spaces.  Research on age verification and the UK Online Safety Act also points to VPN spikes and privacy concerns after age checks. At the same time, early analysis of Australia's ban suggests children often learn to evade controls rather than comply. When governments use 'protecting children' as the justification for sweeping digital control, the question is no longer whether they mean well. It’s whether they are building the infrastructure for something far more dangerous. #ForTheKids 🤔

Hal Finney understood early that Bitcoin could serve two worlds. It could become ‘a reserve currency for banks’ while still remaining permissionless money anyone can hold and use without intermediaries. As Eric Balchunas said, Bitcoin has two major advantages. It is censorship resistant and a debasement hedge because of its scarcity. The important thing is preserving access to both uses, so it can integrate without surrender and scale without ceasing to be freedom money. This is the most elegant monetary achievement in history.