How Bitcoin CoinJoins Help Facilitate Pro-Democracy Protests

Hundreds of activists around the world use bitcoin for its censorship resistance properties — rather than speculative trading. From Nigeria to Russia, activists across the globe see bitcoin as a tool for promoting pro-democracy protests despite financial repression.

Financial repression and nonviolent resistance in a variety of dictatorships were a few of the topics of discussion at the Human Rights Foundation’s Global Bitcoin
Bitcoin
Summit on Thursday, October 3. Protests usually need money to function, and so seizing cash and freezing bank accounts is an effective way to neutralize citizens’ ability to fight back against dictators before they can become too organized. Often this financial repression is enough to force the end of the protests, due to the difficulty of organizing protests without any money, and organizers’ uncertainty about their survival without financial access.

Bitcoin cannot be seized, because it is not a physical asset residing in space. It is a digital asset, residing at an address in the bitcoin blockchain. In order to use bitcoin, one need only have a 64-character private key to that address, or a 12-word (or 24-word) phrase associated with a wallet. Private keys are too long to memorize for most people, but a piece of paper on which a private key is written is much easier to hide than physical cash. Bitcoin also cannot be frozen, because there are no authorities on the Bitcoin network that have the power to block or stop transactions. Even if there is an address that a person wants to stop from transacting on the bitcoin network, there is nothing they can do about it.

These features of bitcoin are often fretted over by American authorities bemoaning their inability to prevent foreign adversaries from transacting using bitcoin, despite the American authorities’ best efforts to sanction them. But of course, a network that resists censorship by foreign authorities of necessity resists censorship by American authorities. This is a price we must be willing to pay for the sake of democratic activists worldwide. According to the Varieties of Democracy Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, 5.7 billion people – 72% of the world’s population – live under authoritarian rule.

When financial repression fails, dictators turn to the second tactic – arrests, often followed by torture. One might think that using bitcoin makes it difficult to find those responsible through the protests – at least through their financial transactions. But this isn’t the case. Bitcoin transactions are recorded on the ledger, and the ledger is public. Anyone can download it, view it, and analyze it. And while the ledger doesn’t contain people’s identities or locations, it is subject to analysis and often yields identifying information. This, of course, can be disastrous for anti-authoritarian pro-democracy protesters and activists. The greater the resources of the dictatorship, the greater the risk of using bitcoin. It’s better than banks, to be sure, but it’s a risk nonetheless.

There are ways to make bitcoin transactions more private. One is CoinJoins. In a CoinJoin, users jointly construct transactions where their coins are combined and then sent out to various addresses. None of the destination addresses is connected to any of the originating addresses. Nobody knows who else is CoinJoining with them. Since it is an automatic protocol, no coordinating authority has custody of the bitcoin involved; each user retains control of their own coins throughout.

Because of CoinJoins, a person can send money to an activist or protestor without anyone knowing who sent it. A Russian national can send bitcoin to the Anti-Corruption Foundation through a CoinJoin without Putin’s government knowing – even if Putin’s government knows who the originating address belongs to and who the final destination address belongs to. Of course, in such cases, multiple rounds of CoinJoining is advisable.

Because of the censorship-resistance of bitcoin, it is a favorite tool of protestors. But it is not private enough to make them comfortable that they won’t be identified and arrested. So they turn to the privacy-preserving features of CoinJoins.

CoinJoins enable pro-democracy protesters fighting against dictators to use censorship-resistant money – bitcoin – more privately. People can hide their identities from those hunting them. This is something that should be encouraged and supported. But some governments – democratic governments, even – have taken a different view. They’ve said that CoinJoins violate anti-money-laundering rules. The U.S. government arrested the developers of a privacy-focused wallet called Samourai Wallet that…