BREAKDOWN: Is Bitcoin a Trojan Horse for Freedom?
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 13 June 2021
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A reading of Alex Gladstein’s recent essay.
This episode is sponsored by Nexo.io.
This week’s “Long Reads Sunday” presents a reading of Human Rights Foundation CSO Alex Gladstein’s piece “Bitcoin Is a Trojan Horse for Freedom.” NLW contextualizes the piece with this week’s landmark legislation out of El Salvador and the concerns some international observers have about that country’s president.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. |
| 0:09.1 | It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. |
| 0:16.0 | The breakdown is sponsored by nexo.io and produced and distributed by CoinDes. |
| 0:22.6 | What's going on, guys? It is Sunday, June 13th, and that means it's time for long reads Sunday. |
| 0:29.0 | And this week, there was really only one choice in my mind for this reading. |
| 0:34.8 | We've spent most of the week talking about discussing, thinking about exploring |
| 0:39.2 | El Salvador making Bitcoin legal tender. Now, if there is one down note in that, or at least |
| 0:46.1 | cautious note, it has to do with President Naib Buckele. On the one hand, there is no denying |
| 0:52.9 | how popular he is, how effectual he has been in his short time in power. |
| 0:58.3 | There is also no denying that the politicians that came before him and the institutions he inherited have a multi-decade history of corruption going back all the way to the civil war that tore apart El Salvador throughout the 80s. |
| 1:12.3 | Still, there are concerns that some in the international community have around what they see |
| 1:17.3 | as autocratic or authoritarian tendencies. Buckele showing up in the assembly building with soldiers |
| 1:23.6 | to try to put pressure to vote through a security law. Buckeli removing judges who didn't agree with him. |
| 1:30.9 | Now, I gave my perspective on this a couple of shows ago. |
| 1:34.0 | But of course, if you looked on Twitter, many were looking to Alex Gladstein, the chief |
| 1:38.0 | strategy officer for the Human Rights Foundation, to what he thought. |
| 1:42.1 | Over and over, his take has been that that no, we shouldn't ignore those things, |
| 1:47.0 | but we should also acknowledge how different a move it is to adopt a system that is not controllable |
| 1:52.6 | rather than some new fiat standard, which would be highly manipulable for the government. |
| 1:58.0 | Indeed, Gladstein pointed to a piece of his written before this whole El Salvador |
| 2:02.0 | situation even came up from April of this year called Bitcoin is a Trojan Horse for Freedom. |
| 2:08.3 | So that is what we're going to read today. Bitcoin is a Trojan horse for freedom. |
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