It's more dangerous to connect Bitcoin to human rights than to terror in the Middle East.

Once you connect it to human rights, people will get extremely scared.

This is the difference between like a dictatorship and a democracy.

Exactly.

In a democracy, what the government banks will try to do is say that Bitcoin is too close to terror.

But in dictatorships, they'll say, oh, it's too close to being used for human rights and,

you know, democracy work, because that's the equivalent of terrorism in your country, right?

Exactly. Exactly.

Hello, everybody. I'm Coin desk reporter Lee Quinn, joined today by Alex Gladstein of the Human Rights

Foundation and Syrian entrepreneur Mo Gashem, who teaches refugees about Bitcoin along the Syrian-Turkish border.

Today we're going to talk about some of the ethical nuance surrounding censorship resistance.

Thanks for joining me today, guys. Thank you. Our pleasure. Mo, can you start us off by sharing a little bit about how you've used Bitcoin and what your

students find useful about this technology?

Yeah, sure.

I initially started to learn about Bitcoin when I was trying to solve payment issues

in the Middle East, North Africa.

That's where I had my startup in the e-commerce space, and I thought it isn't working in

the region.

And that's where I came across Bitcoin, and then I decided to stop everything I'm doing

and learn about it because I was shocked how much I don't know about what's going on.

As I started to learn more about it and really love the whole concept, I thought,

we need to learn about it at Syrians, not only about the price. And I did a few workshops in

...