The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) is pleased to share “Why Bitcoin is Freedom Money,” a new essay by HRF Chief Strategy Officer Alex Gladstein, published in the Journal of Democracy.
In authoritarian regimes, financial systems have become instruments of control, used to surveil, silence, and punish dissent. Access to traditional banking is often restricted for activists, journalists, and civil society groups, making it nearly impossible to fund critical work. This article explores how Bitcoin is helping to protect the right to transact freely and securely in the face of systemic repression. Drawing on real-world examples from Nigeria, Cuba, Russia, Togo, and more, Gladstein reveals how Bitcoin is empowering dissidents where other systems fail.
This essay appears in the latest digital and print editions of Journal of Democracy, Volume 36, Number 4, October 2025 Johns Hopkins University Press.
Why Bitcoin is Freedom Money
Fifty years ago, governments could not easily monitor or control the economy at the level of the individual. Most daily transactions across the planet were still conducted through cash, or maybe paper check, did not immediately register in a database, and could not be used to model the behavior of citizens or surveil dissidents. That world is long gone.
Today, when digital spending dominates, most transactions are instantly visible, or at least easy for authorities to look up later. What you spend says more about you than what you say. Governments can see who buys what, who pays whom, and who donates to which cause. Enemies of the state (real or imaginary) can be shuttered with the arbitrary click of a button — no court warrant needed. Sometimes, as is the case in China, a decision to stop a critic’s money does not even have to be made. An AI tool automates the process, bringing science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s idea of “precrime” into dystopian reality.
Worse still, the paper bills or digital credits available to people living under authoritarian regimes are designed to collapse in value. Strong-men routinely inflate their national currencies to fund police states, wars, security forces, and lavish lifestyles at the expense of the living standards of average citizens. Take Egypt as an obvious example: Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is famous for receiving international bailouts of billions of U.S. dollars while conducting overnight devaluations of the Egyptian pound, which has lost more than 85 percent of its purchasing power against the U.S. dollar in the past decade. Sisi clings to power, while the lower and middle classes are paying twice or even three times as much for basic goods as they did just a few years ago.
