“Bitcoin has the potential, in a very practical way, to help other people we call high-risk people,” said Mogashni Naidoo, Bitcoin user experience (UX) researcher at Bitcoin Design Community, in her presentation at the conference. . . « I think in building those apps, we want to connect with the humans who actually use them. “
Naidoo referenced her procedure of interviewing users of products like Bitcoin wallets that she and her team design before even conceptualizing what the product looks like.
“If we locate answers before we perceive the problem, then we will only be making assumptions,” Naidoo added.
Seth For Privacy, head of marketing and strategy at Foundation, a Bitcoin hardware wallet company, adopted a strategy and came to the conference to better understand what activists need in terms of Bitcoin.
“It’s stimulating to have those conversations,” he told me in an interview. “They help us see the upheavals that other people in the room have that we don’t realize in the Bitcoin Twitter bubble or in places where only Bitcoiners gather and talk. “.
Seth For Privacy, an advocate for privacy in Bitcoin transactions, as his pseudonym suggests, also commented that the convention required him to keep privacy in mind when designing new products.
“Seeing other people who really want Bitcoin as the money of freedom is the most productive catalyst for us to think more deeply about Bitcoin privacy, to assess where Bitcoin privacy is right now and how we can achieve it,” he added.
The privacy of Bitcoin transactions is a prominent topic of the event.
Following the arrest by the U. S. Department of Justice, the U. S. Department of JusticeUU. de the founders of Samourai Wallet, a privacy-focused Bitcoin wallet, many of the convention participants were concerned about the future of the technology.
Anna Chekhovich, monetary director of Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, expressed her fear before a panel.
“If the chilling effect on Bitcoin developers increases, it may hurt freedom fighters around the world,” Chekhovich said.
Alex Gladstein, director of strategy at the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), the organization that organizes the Oslo Freedom Forum, under pressure that HRF has a longstanding commitment to maintaining activists’ privacy.
“HRF’s focus on Bitcoin included privacy,” Gladstein told me in an interview. “This has been very basic for us, because activists are constantly spied on. “
He went on to explain how HRF has funded projects that help keep Bitcoin transactions private, such as the Cashu ecash protocol and the Bitcoin Sparrow Wallet desktop wallet. The creators of those two technologies also spoke at the event.
“We are very proud to have supported privacy over the years,” Gladstein added.
Several speakers at the event came from the Global South, a term that encompasses Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, or under authoritarian regimes. They explained how they intuitively perceive Bitcoin, as it gives economic application and to classical economies and economies. systems. in their respective countries, this is not the case.
This is in contrast to some participants from Western countries (jurisdictions governed by democratically elected leaders and with highly functional monetary systems) who still struggle to perceive the need for something like Bitcoin.
“It’s even harder to teach in Western countries than in African countries or anywhere else, where other people get bitcoins very temporarily because they want a tool to help them send cash in and out of the country or because they have the freedom to pay for anything. that the government might not want. I don’t want them to [pay for],” Anita Posch, founder of Crack The Orange and Bitcoin For Fairness, told me in an interview.
Posch has traveled to several African countries, including Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Ghana, to teach Bitcoin to activists and others alike. He has facilitated several sessions at the Oslo Freedom Forum where he shared his wisdom on how to use Bitcoin privately. , while constantly highlighting the fact that Bitcoin is a must-have tool for activists.
“It’s very, very important to get the message across that Bitcoin is a tool that defends human rights,” he told me.
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