Trust me, being a Canadian, there was nothing more embarrassing and scary, than to see how many of my neighbours are straight up fascists.
I haven’t dug deep enough in what happened with the Bitcoin influencers. It’s something I will have to do soon. If you do have links for me to check out, please feel free to send them my way.
Honestly, I do not fault them, nor do I believe it was a bad idea for everyone involved to retreat. Based on my observations of the events, I don’t think any person within the movement understood how far the state was willing to go. I think the perspective going in, was to create enough political pressure across the country from the protest, to have the government backtrack on their authoritative health measures. Unfortunately, the state did not want to play ball, and started a war. I think everyone was ill equipped to fight that war, because no one thought the state would take it that far. It is why I think retreating was the best course of action, this time around.
We learned a lot from the events, which I hope will ready us to bring the fight back to them soon.
It is obvious they will continue to use the media to propagate false information. The corporate media narrative is not something we can control, but we can mitigate it, knowing their playbook. Some of us knew they would use agent provocateurs to portray the movement negatively. Unfortunately, not everyone knew this at the time. Now, this is something that can be strategized around in the future.
Politically, it was a mistake to let one of the political parties attach itself to the movement. All it did was muddy the waters as to what the movement’s alignments and goals were. It is something a minority of the organizers understood early, but unfortunately the majority didn’t.
The biggest lesson learned was how the government could use financial weapons to attack us. The cat is now out of the bag. Defending against a financial attack is the hardest problem to solve. Bitcoin, not Monero, is the best tool to fight back. While I respect the Monero protocol, it is not the answer.
The issue we ran into with Bitcoin, was the exchanges not allowing the transition from sats to dollars. The truckers were not able to buy food and gas with bitcoin, and needed to exchange sats into dollars to do so. Monero wouldn’t have made a difference in that regard. If anything, it would have been more difficult to exchange than Bitcoin.
Centralizing the bitcoin transactions to the protest organizers wasn’t a good idea either, as it made it easier to block off the exits. While it was a tactical mistake, I think things happened too quickly for a better strategy to be deployed.
The choke point wasn’t the KYC, in opinion. The choke point was the need to exchange sats into dollars. Without that need, the bitcoins could have been used to support the protest indefinitely. This is why I strongly support BTC Session’s leadership in bolstering a circular Bitcoin economy within our city, and I hope others are doing the same elsewhere. If the bitcoins can be transacted P2P for tangible things, then the KYC issue doesn’t matter. The state wouldn’t be able to use their agent Smiths to kick in everyone’s doors. If the BTC is sent to one centralized wallet, then yes, they can.
I don’t even believe Monero could have helped around the KYC problem. Even if the exchanges allowed XMR to dollar conversion, the fact that the wallet held all of the donations would have been too obvious. If everyone was told to donate with XMR, the state would have known and simply would have waited for a big bag to be converted on an exchange, to know which wallet was theirs. While Monero has private transactions, it doesn’t have enough liquidity to hide the exit. The only way to defend around this, would be to transact P2P with XMR. At this point, mass P2P crypto transactions would be much easier to accomplish on wide enough scale with Bitcoin than Monero, mostly due to its stronger memetic properties.
To enable better P2P, not only do we need to grow the circular economy, we also need to continue developing tools to facilitate it. That’s where I hope people like Booth come in. I hope the experience showed him how important it is to accelerate software development. I hope he is doing everything he can through his Ego Death Capital fund to develop defensive softwares, that will facilitate P2P transactions and protection of funds.
Everyone has their role to play in this. We need influencers to grow the community. We need developers to improve the user interface. We need Monero people to pressure Bitcoin to accelerate privacy on the secondary layers. We need people to keep the community honest by critiquing its leaders and plebs. We need everyone to step up. It’s the only way we’ll be able to push forward.
I think retreating was the right move, then. But next time, the only course of action will be to go forward.
