A recent campaign to prohibit a Russian news agency is the newest reminder that the world requirements permissionless, neutral monetary systems. The next time someone complacently tells you there is “no genuine use case” for cryptocurrency or declares that it has “no saving social value,” shove this story in his or her face:
Meduza, a Russian news passage, is petitioning donations in cryptocurrency (along with traditional payment methods) after the rule labeled it a “foreign agent,” CoinDesk’s on-the-ground communicator, Anna Baydakova, stated Thursday.
Meduza is now necessary by law to post a sign of its “foreign agent” status in a typeface greater than the text of its articles. As an outcome of this scarlet letter, Meduza lost several of its supporters and ran out of money, the squad behind the publication said. It hasn’t been de-platformed by traditional financial institutions because it is also taking aids from bank card and PayPal. But the reasons Meduza gave for counting the crypto choice were telling.
A skeptic might note that contributors who send bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), or BNB to Meduza would leave an enduring record of their movements on the blockchains, or public books, of these assets. But such a record would show only the speech, a random-seeming string of numbers and letters that sent the money, not the individual behind it.
By all means, let’s pay courtesy to how terrorists, distant or now, we’re told, domestic, might take benefit of this technology. But if we’re going to responsibility anyone or anything other than the terrorists for their actions, recall it was not Satoshi Nakamoto who damaged the Middle East or hollowed-out Middle America.