Bitcoin on the Frontlines of Human Rights | Bitcoin 2026

[music] [applause] >> Good afternoon everyone. It's a real pleasure to be here. I wanted to thank the organizers for helping put human rights on the main stage. Two quick comments before we get into it. Uh number one, I think that the general kind of content you see here is a particularly American interpretation of Bitcoin. It's an American take on Bitcoin. It's what Americans care about and this is an American Bitcoin conference, so that's I think quite appropriate. Americans care about investment and in integrating Bitcoin into the financial system. And obviously Michael does a great job at continuing to push that forward. Um but around the world Bitcoin serves other purposes. I think what what we're starting to see essentially is that the focus in America is on Bitcoin as a you know, store of value as an investment, um as something that's going to be again integrated into markets. And in other continents and other places it's actually being used more as money and as currency. So Americans constitute about 4% of the world's population. And you know, this is our take on Bitcoin, but this is not the global take on Bitcoin. I would encourage you to look around the global Bitcoin ecosystem and you're going to see some truly amazing stuff happening that you know, we Americans would never think of ourselves because we kind of have a very you know, privileged financial system. We have a stable currency, we have stable payments. Most people don't. So a lot of the innovations you're going to see out there in the world of Bitcoin today are happening in Southeast Asia, in South you know, Southern Africa and Latin America. Um so that's just sort of one comment I would make and the second one is that all of the conversation about integrating Bitcoin into the financial system and creating new derivatives and credit in Bitcoin. I mean, all of this is still part of the Bitcoin brand. What's what's really fun and interesting about Bitcoin is as long as it's Bitcoin, it's good for Bitcoin. Like what what a lot of people here are doing has nothing to do with like revolutionary activism or taking down a dictator or whatever. But that's okay because what they're doing is in the end of the day they're working for us, too. Because they're pushing Bitcoin forward and they're making it a more powerful tool for human rights um inevitably, which is such an interesting part of Bitcoin's journey. Uh so with that I'm going to start to introduce my good friends here who I met in my career as a human rights activist and later we figured out that we had some Bitcoin stuff in common. But I'm going to start with Evan. Um you know, the audience saw a little bit about your background, but can you tell us a little bit big picture zoom out about you uh and your and your story, Evan? Well, in in 2008 Zimbabwe went through this incredible hyperinflation period and some of you may know about it, but inflation was running at about 586 million percent. We lost everything. So in 2016 I was pastoring a small church in Harare and I began to speak up against the ruin, the financial and economic ruin of ordinary people. And all we were doing was saying to people, find your voice and figure out a way to stand up so that in some way you could perhaps protect yourself from being robbed by the dictatorship over and over again. And it was a powerful journey because over four years we were able to mobilize at least 12 million people to be able to stand up. >> 12 million people. >> Yeah, to be able to stand In fact, our largest protest that we did is what we called shut down Zimbabwe. And all we did was we asked people to stay at home on one particular day. We shut the entire country down. Don't go to work, don't take your kids to school, don't open your business, don't go to the bank, don't go to the supermarket. Stay at home as a way of saying enough is enough because we ended up with this 100 trillion dollar note, which was the largest note in Zimbabwe at that time and that was enough to buy two loaves of bread. And so the movement grew. I ended up in prison a bunch of times, but it was worth it because there's nothing more powerful than seeing a people empowered to defend themselves or to stand up for themselves. And yeah, give it up for Evan. Amazing. Again, proof that uh peaceful revolution can happen and that people can can change the destiny of their country. Uh for another example of that, my friend Seruga, uh take us back to to what you were doing in the early '90s and and what you and you and your fellow students were able to do. Well, you've seen the part of it in video, but basically it's like what happened in Serbia was that the whole generation raised against the dictator Slobodan Milosevic, guy starting wars, genocide and by the way destroying the currency of the country and what happened was that we were able like a small startup to grow from 11 people to about 20,000 people. Uh mobilize young people to vote, unite the opposition, get rid of Milosevic. And this is where the more interesting part of my of my life started in a in a weird way because immediately because of the movie bringing down dictator, a lot of people from different places, Zimbabwe included, were like coming to us and say, "Oh, you've done it so well. We want to do it at home." And this is the moment where I ended up doing something I never thought I would be doing in my life, training activists around the world. And here am I like 25 years later, I'm still hanging out with these people. So what we figure out working >> But you went into politics first and that didn't work out for you. >> Okay, you need to remind me on that. Yeah. Yeah, I've spent three years in a parliament trying to change the beast from the inside. But it was not really thrilling. Uh basically what happened later is like this idea is like you work with the people like Evan, like Annais and you figure out that all of these conflicts are different, but what connects them is people need skills. And the there are skills which are quintessential to deal with the dictatorship. Some of them, building strategy, working under oppression, taking creative tactics. And this is how I ended up talking with you and other people from HRF because one of these skills is the access to money. The first thing the authoritarian government will do it, they will go after your account, they will list your organization as a foreign agent, they will do anything in their power to prevent troublemakers for getting money. And this is where the skill of moving digital money like Bitcoin is quintessential. So we have two people who helped peacefully take down a dictator uh with with without even a shot fired. It's amazing. Um so give it up for Seruga. Awesome to have you here. Um and then Annais we met uh during the campaign to free your father. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your story and uh kind of what's brought you here so far? Absolutely. So as y'all saw in the little short intro, my father is Paul Rusesabagina. His life story was told during the movie Hotel Rwanda. And when the movie came out, it gave him a big platform to really talk about the challenges our country was going through in the early 2000 right after the genocide. Since our president Paul Kagame has been winning by 99.15% we've changed constitution many times and we've started wars in the Congo. But yet when my father was speaking about this, it made him the biggest critic of Rwanda and he was kidnapped in 2020. During our campaign um we knocked on every single door possible until we arrived at the HRF doors and attended the Oslo Freedom Forum and spoke to the public there and we learned that we had Pegasus on my sister's phone and on my cousin's phone. That was through a a group called Citizen Lab that checks phones people. And because of that we realized that the government that also had our father was surveilling us every single move that we had they were making. Communications, any payment that we're making, any people that we're talking to. And so we realized, you know, how can we help ourselves? And that's when many people in the freedom community really opened the doors to us and showed us different ways we can do to advocate for our father to ensure we can get secure his release, which happened uh three years ago. So he's now a free man. Um and since I Thank you. And since I really dedicated my time to support those who supported us, but also to educate folks about freedom technologies including um technologies like Bitcoin. For many political prisoners, when they're freed, they're completely put out of debanked. Um sometimes they even lose their nationality. And so we work with many political prisoners as well as other communities, but for me that was really important to find a way to support political prisoners even after uh their release and I started learning more through Bitcoin. Yeah. Welcome to Predict. The world is a market. Everything is a market. >> [music] >> Every headline moves the line. Every moment is your market. Call the moves. Bet on your instinct. Your prediction, your edge. Dorbets, predict where everything is a market. So one thing that's often left out of the human rights conversation is the impact governments have on on currency and the relationship between individual rights and um basically the technology by which people earn uh you know, earn the you know, earn earn a living and earn their labor. So the these are the currencies that our friends here have have have lived experience living under as they collapsed in different ways. Yvonne mentioned the hundred trillion dollar note from Zimbabwe. You know, at one point Yvonne, you mentioned to me that you guys used to wear a necklace in Zimbabwe to remind you of what the Zimbabwean dollar used to be. And you want to tell us a little bit about that? >> Yeah, a couple of friends of mine and I we we we took the old Zimbabwe dollar which was a coin and we From what it was like from around 1980. And at the time in 1980, one Zimbabwe dollar was actually worth two United States dollars. >> Worth two US dollars. >> Two US dollars, yeah. And so over the years that dollar became so eroded that when we got to 2016, actually when we got to 2008, not only had it been scrapped, but what it had been replaced with was worth absolutely nothing. I'll tell you a story about this 100 trillion dollar So, basically it lost declined in value, you know, to the point where it was one one one trillionth of what it used to be. Exactly. And then you've got to put that into context. One one trillion of what it used to be. >> puts a different spin on the idea that everybody can be a trillionaire. Exactly, yeah. But you know, this the story of the when you look at it, you know, we laugh about it and call it funny money, but it's tragic because of what people lost. Because Zimbabwe was and still is a dictatorship, it means that there is no recourse to justice when you lose everything you have. My parents had retired. They were 70 years old in 2008 and had retired and had about 80,000 US dollars in the bank as their retirement. There came a point where the the inflation was so high and moving so fast that over a 7-day period the government banned any withdrawals from the bank. And my my parents went from one Sunday having 80,000 US dollars in the bank to the next Sunday having 25 cents left in their bank account. >> 80,000 dollars to 25 cents. >> 25 cents. They lost everything. And that's just just the the story of losing everything. Rebuilding it is a complete disaster. >> also the story of this one family. I mean, this happened to millions of people. >> and and there were no one was held accountable. No one was held accountable for that money. >> No one's ever gone to prison for hyperinflation. And that's what I ended up in maximum security prison for for saying to the government, "What did you do with our money?" For saying to the government, "You have got to restore what you took from from our people." And I think for me the journey there, the realization there was that as we fight for freedom, more than anything else. When I met people in prison, when I met people on the streets, the biggest thing I realized that people were fighting for dignity. And this is why I then got involved with understanding how Bitcoin works and how it can be adapted for people that live in the poorest parts of the world or the most oppressed parts of the world because we're not just fighting for money, you know, so that we can be wealthy. We're fighting for a a sense of self-worth. We're fighting for a sense of dignity. A way just to respect ourselves that says, "At least I have something to my name." And I think Bitcoin can solve that. And Serge, you you lived through something. Yeah, I mean, let's go. I mean Bitcoin's original use case was money beyond the state's control and that's what its primary use case is today and will remain. I mean, that's what we're here for. There's a lot of other stuff going on and as I mentioned, it does all connect back to this one central use case. If Bitcoin was controlled by states and corporations, it would not be very valuable. It would not have gone from zero to 77,000 dollars. It would not be the best performing asset in the history of money and of investment and of currency. But because of its traits, it does these things. And those traits are what we, you know, so enjoy and get excited about in a world that, you know, can often be quite depressing. Um this is a reason for optimism. And Serge, you lived through something similar, uh another hyperinflationary episode. You know, do you want to give us a little story from from that time? Okay, just to say we were at first and then Zimbabwe was more affected. So, it's like what you're seeing on the screen, which has this weird pink greenish colors, it is a 500 billion dinar bill. It was worth like at the time two kilos of apples. Speaking of that of that bill, the reason why it has the strange colors is because they were printing money so much that they, you know, get off all the normal colors. So, you can only print money in things like this hallucinogenic uh uh uh colors. But what really happens is like, you know, it's like you see your parents losing everything over the course of few years. You see your family going from normal middle class into smuggling petrol and things to survive. And guess what? That's a recipe for dictatorship. Because if people are too busy surviving, they don't have time to think about the social change. And that brings us to the broader philosophical thinking that you just outlined. It is the government decides how much my work worth. It is the government decides how much is the pension of the of the of the Evan Mawarire. So, we need to take this power back to the people and this is so important because this is in part how you stop these oppressive tools. And what we are looking at here in this Bitcoin space, especially coming from somebody who is teaching people in oppressive societies to use this as a tool, we are looking into these pieces of future infrastructure, the Bitcoin, the AI. Imagine if you can equip people fighting for freedom with these tools. That means that here we are producing something that it will be used by people elsewhere and never stop doing this. Yeah, and this is this is not ancient history here. Unfortunately, in the last few years, the people who live in Nigeria, 220 million people, their currency has lost more than 75% of its value against the dollar. You know, you have something similar happen in Egypt, the largest country in in the Middle East. You have double-digit inflation in countries that affect billions of people. So, this this kind of story is more similar to the average human experience than than the American story. That's for sure. So, this is what we talk about when we talk about financial privilege. And and even from from kind of your part of the world, N A E Sweet, we saw this note from Zaire and similar story. When Mobutu, General Mobutu took it took power in the early 70s, one Zaire was worth a dollar basically. And by the time he was chased out, one Zaire was worth like one billionth of that, right? So, an another yet another tragic you know, proof and evidence of what governments do over time to money, right? Oh, yes. And then on top of that, you add wars wars with that are supposed to keep people again in impoverished people's survival mode and so you cannot fight for yourself. And so specifically in the in Zaire now, which is called the Democratic Republic of the Congo, when Mobutu was uh pushed out in 1997 and the new DRC franc was introduced, it has never been able to re take its power, grow again because the country has been in conflict for the last 30 years. And this conflict sadly has been really triggered by my country, Rwanda, which has been under dictatorship for the last 30 years as well. The consequences of this today is that in Eastern Congo, that so many people may have heard of because of the Washington Accords being signed recently, in Eastern Congo, the city of Goma, doesn't have any ATMs working. So, since 2025, last year January, over one more one year, people are not able to get cash out. And it's a city where it's a cash economy. People now are using Rwandan francs from another country or using the dollar to be able to sustain themselves in that specific part of the country. And that is really an outcome of decade-long autocracy and then wars. And all for what? To suppress the people so people are not able to have agency and resilience to fight back against this type of oppression. And it's not it's not like when there's hyperinflation, your boss gives you a raise to to compensate. This is not what happens. People just get in literally impoverished is what you're seeing happen in country like Egypt today. You know, people the average person can buy less bread than they could five years ago. It's just like the reality. So, you know, it's not a situation in the fiat currency world where a rising tide lifts all boats. That's not what's been happening. Some currencies do okay, but the vast majority of them go to zero and that's what we've what we've seen and that's why Bitcoin presents such an interesting escape, such an interesting plan B. So, let's get into that. You are three of the most prominent human rights defenders in the world and you've all started to integrate Bitcoin in different ways. Maybe we'll start with you N A E Sweet and we'll work our way back down. Absolutely. So, in the last year we've launched the Africa Bitcoin Institute, which is a research uh think tank institute to dedicated to understand better the adoption of Bitcoin on the continent because a lot of um innovation is happening on the continent because it's coming from a need. And we have more than our countries are under autocracy. Inflation is a major problem. Trade is a major problem from one country to the other. Remittance is also very expensive. And so many people are using Bitcoin as a as a solution to all these problems and the innovation that we see is incredible and the Africa Bitcoin Institute wants to tell the story, show to the world what is happening, but also help policy makers understand that Bitcoin can also support a the economic development and growth of their countries as well as at the end of the day, we do want a freer country, democratic country, but our democratic countries also have to be economically sovereign and strong. And so, the Africa Bitcoin Institute is supporting in shaping that path for our continent. Right. Like so, the the spread of stable coins is, you know, kind of like putting a little band-aid on a festering wound. It it it really just perpetuates the existing system. Bitcoin is the real escape, the real alternative, the real way to get freedom and sovereignty. And the innovations happening in Africa and Bitcoin are incredible. People have learned how to use Bitcoin without the internet, with Machankura uh Gridless has pioneered decentralized Bitcoin mining with renewable energy that Africa has so much untapped stranded renewable energy. I've seen it. I've visited these sites. You have Tanda in Kenya where people can now live in Bitcoin and pay for anything in the country because everybody accepts mobile money and there's an app that just does a seamless little swap of your Bitcoin into mobile money. So, you can pay for anything with Bitcoin and live on it and that's becoming the reality there and those are not necessarily innovations that, you know, people know about here. So, having a policy institute that can help you know, the the leaders there understand the benefits and the fruits that Bitcoin's bringing to its people uh will be huge. So, Sergio, what about you when it comes to, you know, Canvas, your work supporting movements around the world? It obviously entails, you know, helping advise on how to move money. Often we have foreign agent laws that prevent groups from getting foreign money. Uh you know, these groups get strangled and they end up not being able to do anything. So, the rise of a new way to send money is is pretty interesting, right? Uh well, I mean, we moved from a my organization Canvas which trains movements really now it's becoming Bitcoin friendly in many different ways. We try to raise money in Bitcoin. We try to send money in Bitcoin. We teach people how to raise money anonymously. One of the goals of dictators is to scare potential donors. >> Yes, that's a big one. >> And if you can do it anonymously and safely, then of course, it's a completely different world. But basically, we I think now we are even trying to raise Bitcoin to develop an AI that will help activists. So, we are using it in our advanced work. Speaking of this, I will I will try to get with uh with with one things that we are very often think in Canvas. Like the way this spreads, the way this will be adopted, the way we are seeing this adopted is that the people in need are more likely to try new things. And that's the reason why activists will will be very quick, I think, in adopting the Bitcoins. And and in Canvas, we often, you know, live by the quote of Ben Franklin that there are like three types of people in every society. There are those unmovable, there are those movable, and there are those who move. Yeah. And if you help those who move, then you become the movers and then you help them move the society. With this type of skills, you're doing exactly that. Yeah, and we can just reach anywhere. Like there's a really amazing human rights defender here in Umbreen Abu from Afghanistan and she uses Bitcoin to fund underground education for women in her country. You can't use the US dollar for that. You you can't use the US dollar for the use cases we're describing. So, you know, when you hear journalists talk about, "Oh, Bitcoin's useless." I mean, this is just so uninformed and wrong. And and they really need to just get out in the world and talk to people and learn about the human rights revolution that is represented by Bitcoin. Um so, Ivan, you you wanted to say something maybe to the developers here who often are very alone, working remotely, you know, they don't necessarily get to see the impact of their work. It can be a lonely kind of solitary life. Um what would you say to the people making open source software who often do it at great personal risk? I mean, there's um people here in the United States even, the Samurai folks who are in prison for making code. So, free Samurai. I mean, what would you say to the software developers out there? You know what? And let me this is where I want to put on my pastor hat for a second, if you allow me. I want to do two things and and and the two things are number one, to celebrate the developers that that have put themselves to work to make these platforms and these technologies. And the reason I want to celebrate you is that you are making things that people who live in the most oppressed societies can use to save their lives and to safeguard their futures. And here's the thing about it. These people will never get a chance to say thank you to you. And I'm here on behalf of people that have used technologies that have been made by people who are part of the developers who are here to say thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your hard work. Thank you for your investment. You may not see the return of that investment in your bank account, but I'm telling you that that return is there >> [clears throat] >> in a family that's able to live another week, another month, another year because of what you produced. And the second thing is to encourage you to not give up. Please, for the sake of an old lady who is somewhere in Tanzania, a young man who is in Zimbabwe, continue to develop these things. Continue to work on these platforms because whilst you may not see the results today, there will come a time where somebody will find what you have made and it will save their lives. So, thank you and keep going. Let's hear it. Let's go. Thank you, Ivan. Um Well, thank you guys for joining us today. I'll just leave you with a couple thoughts. This movement comes together often at the Oslo Freedom Forum happening in Norway in a few weeks. That might be something you want to check out. We're probably going to work with Bitcoin Magazine again to live stream the Freedom Tech portion of that. That's always a lot of fun. Um you know, the and then yeah, the the the other cool thing we're doing here aside from having the opportunity to talk to you right now is that the Human Rights Foundation has put together a Freedom Go Up stage. You got to check it out. It's awesome. It's it's by one of the entrances over here in this in the uh in the little village and uh we're about to go over there and and join uh Matt Odell and Marty Bent. We're going to and Danny Knowles. We're going to talk about what's happening in the Freedom Tech space. Um so, please check out the FGU stage. Thanks for your time and thanks for your commitment to the connection between Bitcoin and human rights. We appreciate you. Thank you so much. Take care. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> [music] >> Every year, this community comes together to celebrate, to debate, to build what comes next. >> [music] >> And every year, the stage gets bigger. >> [music] >> Sound money center stage. So, where do you go [music] to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? You come home. >> [music] >> Nashville, July 20 27.