By Bitcoin 杂志 - 1 年前 - 阅读时间：14 分钟
Honk, Honk, HODL: How Bitcoin Fueled The Freedom Convoy And Defied Government Crackdown
Among the chaos of the Freedom Convoy and Canada's authoritarian reaction, Bitcoin proved itself to be a sovereign financial rail for fueling protests.
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The Freedom Convoy, a sweeping protest prompted by COVID-19 vaccine mandates for Canadian truckers, saw authorities work outside of established laws to quell demonstrations and block financial support. Among the chaos, Bitcoin proved itself to be a sovereign financial rail as hundreds of thousands of dollars in BTC reached protestors in spite of government efforts to block donations.
22月3,000日，一支加拿大长途卡车车队离开不列颠哥伦比亚省港口城市鲁珀特王子港，抵达附近的乔治王子城。第二天，另一组卡车从不列颠哥伦比亚省三角洲出发，前往横贯加拿大高速公路的一段路段。到月底，大约 15,000 辆卡车和其他车辆在 XNUMX 多名抗议者的陪同下聚集在该国首都渥太华，封锁了街道，并自称“自由车队”。
该市警方立即对他们的集会展开刑事调查。
抗议者最初的动机是加拿大政府于 19 月 15 日对跨境卡车司机实施了 COVID-7 疫苗强制要求。323 月 208 日及之后的几天，抗议者间歇性封锁了北美最繁忙的国际过境点大使桥，每天都有价值 XNUMX 亿美元的货物通过。渥太华的企业遭到破坏并无法运营，加拿大经济学家 Armine Yalnizyan 后来估计当地工人的工资损失达 XNUMX 亿美元。
抗议者几乎立即成功扰乱了正常的商业活动并吸引了媒体的关注，11 月 14 日，安大略省省长道格·福特宣布进入紧急状态。 30月30日，加拿大政府采取了史无前例的法外措施，自XNUMX多年前颁布以来首次援引《紧急状态法》，赋予当局超越现行法律范围的临时权力来平息抗议活动。当月晚些时候，美国、阿根廷和新西兰等 XNUMX 多个国家也组织了类似的抗议活动。
And through it all, the Freedom Convoy quickly became one of the most high-profile test cases for the use of Bitcoin as a permissionless and censorship-resistant way of transacting value to whomever, wherever, whenever.
“This will be a historical moment for Bitcoin,” explained B.J. Dichter, a Toronto resident born and raised in Canada, who was a long-haul trucker himself before becoming a spokesperson for the Freedom Convoy. “Because we always talked about this hypothetical, the government tyranny of blocking your bank accounts, stealing your money and whatever… Well, now they just did. So, it proved everything. Everything that people said about Bitcoin like, ‘Oh, that’s hyperbolic. That’s never gonna happen.’ Well, guess what? Yesterday’s conspiracy is today’s reality. And I think in the future, people are going to see, that was the moment that regular people and everybody understood that the government can’t track it, can’t block it, and shouldn’t be able to.”
被迫抗议
据统计，2018 年，加拿大卡车运输业的收入约为 31.5 亿美元，运送了超过 63 万件货物。 Statista。从2009年到2018年，它总共创造了277.1亿美元。对于过去几年的许多加拿大人来说，担任长途卡车司机被视为赚取灵活可靠收入的机会。
“我在加拿大法规发生变化之前就获得了许可证，这使得获得卡车运输许可证受到很大限制，”迪希特解释道。 “我哥哥认为退休后我们可以一起做生意，他想进入卡车运输行业……所以，我拿到了驾照，积累了一点经验，有空的时候就做兼职。”关闭……卡车运输变成了一项副业。”
Dichter recalled his role in the Freedom Convoy while sitting in the halls of the Miami Beach Convention Center during the Bitcoin 2022 conference in April, where he had been invited to speak about the role that Bitcoin played in sustaining the protest. He described himself as a “serial entrepreneur,” who has worked as a geologist and diamond grader, in the motorcycle industry, as a podcast producer and more. His own interest in Bitcoin was piqued in 2015 and he first invested in bitcoin 次年。
他说，早在自由车队组织之前，对加拿大卡车司机实施的严格规定就一直是司机和监管机构之间长期争论的焦点。例如，2019 年，来自艾伯塔省的 150 名卡车司机进行了为期四天的车队行驶至渥太华国会山，自称“United We Roll 车队”。根据 当时当地的新闻报道，卡车司机抗议政府征收的一系列税款，包括石油和天然气税。
迪希特称今年的疫苗强制令对加拿大卡车司机来说是“压垮骆驼的最后一根稻草”。
“我们大多数人都接种了疫苗，”他解释道。 “这是命令，缺乏选择。这就是问题所在。”
Dichter described a personal experience that took place just days before the convoy occupation of Ottawa; border agents had tracked his vaccine status by surveilling his phone within a certain vicinity of the U.S. border as he drove back home. To him and many other Canadians, this level of government monitoring was indicative of a growing willingness by government officials to track personal details about their citizens without permission.
“如果是这样的话，那么我们就有了一个完全被跟踪和监视的社会，就像我们要去的地方一样疯狂，我们现在必须阻止这种情况，我们所有人都看到了，”他说。 “正是这些‘请提供文件’的最后限制，跨越边境进入自己的国家就足够了。”
大约在抗议者前往渥太华前一周，自由车队组织者塔玛拉·利奇联系了迪希特，她是一位老朋友，在她的祖国加拿大组织了多次抗议运动。她因在自由车队中的角色于 17 月 XNUMX 日被捕，截至撰写本文时，除法庭相关原因外，法律禁止她返回安大略省。利奇向迪希特请求媒体关系方面的帮助。
“我喜欢这些卡车司机，我是他们的朋友，但他们都没有任何媒体经验或任何媒体培训，”利奇回忆道，他告诉迪彻。 “你能担任发言人，帮助发布新闻稿之类的事情吗？”
Freedom Convoy 组织者于 2022 年 20,000 月在集中捐款处理器 GoFundMe 上发起了筹款活动，希望筹集约 4 美元用于维持抗议所需的燃料和其他基本物资。令他们惊讶的是，截至 100,000 月底，他们已从超过 800,000 万捐助者那里筹集了约 XNUMX 万美元，GoFundMe 已向组织者分发了约 XNUMX 万美元。
但在 2 月初，GoFundMe 因担心筹款活动不符合其服务条款而暂停了分发，其中包括禁止“反映或宣扬支持暴力行为的用户内容”。
“最近在加拿大渥太华发生的事件在 GoFundMe 上引发了有关 Freedom Convoy 2022 筹款活动的广泛讨论，” 公司声明 从 2 月 XNUMX 日开始。“作为我们信息收集过程的一部分，我们还要求组织者提供有关资金使用的更多信息，以确保筹款活动仍然符合我们的服务条款。当我们没有收到所需信息时，我们可能会像本次事件一样暂停捐赠。”
从那时起，加拿大政府开始直接参与从捐助者到抗议者的资金转移。
3 月 XNUMX 日，加拿大下议院的一个委员会要求 GoFundMe 官员就捐赠资金的来源和去向等安全问题作证。国会议员还要求加拿大金融交易和报告分析中心（FINTRAC）作证。第二天，GoFundMe 删除了该活动。
其他几个集中筹款平台开始为自由车队筹集资金，但加拿大政府显然已经划清了界限。以基督徒为中心的捐款平台 GiveSendGo 上的筹款活动已为抗议者筹集了超过 8.5 万加元，但安大略省高等法院下令冻结这些资金。截至 75 月底，加拿大援引《紧急状态法》并冻结了超过 XNUMX 个与抗议活动有关的银行账户。
“Three years ago, if you had asked me what’s the chance that Canada would freeze individuals’ bank accounts… I’d find it really hard to believe it was 20%,” said Greg Foss, an outspoken Bitcoin advocate and fifth-generation Canadian. “And three years later, it’s 100%... It was not a good thing for freedom.”
未经许可的大道
As Dichter and others organizing the Freedom Convoy wrestled with centralized fundraisers, Bitcoiners who had been supporting the movement throughout took it upon themselves to raise BTC donations through Tallycoin, a bitcoin-based fundraising platform.
“ Bitcoin community was awesome,” said Dichter. “Of all the things I had to deal with — these little groups infighting and people, you know, trying to do their own press conferences — the one community that I could depend on was the Bitcoin community, because they had all their ducks lined up. They were great, they just kind of kept me up to date.”
Tallycoin enables donations directly to a fundraiser’s Bitcoin wallet and offers the option to list an extended public key so that each individual Bitcoin payment generates a unique address. This is a critical privacy best practice that makes it more difficult for observers to associate these payments together. The platform also offers Lightning Network donations for fundraisers that use Bitcoin payment processors or by directly connecting their own Lightning nodes.
Using Tallycoin, a Bitcoiner named 尼古拉斯·圣路易斯, who used the pseudonym NobodyCaribou, spun up a fundraising campaign called “HonkHonk Hodl,” receiving its first donation on February 1. As the Freedom Convoy’s fiat fundraisers were shut down and frozen, this Bitcoin-based campaign announced that it had surpassed its 5 BTC goal, worth about $213,000 at the time, on the same day that the Canadian government invoked the Emergencies Act.
But getting the bitcoin from HonkHonk Hodl’s Tallycoin addresses into the hands of protesting truckers, many of whom knew very little about the technology, would be a challenge. St. Louis teamed with J.W. Weatherman, a Bitcoin developer and donor, to establish a plan and they published a lengthy, public Google Doc called “Step-By-Step Guide For Distributing Bitcoin设立的区域办事处外，我们在美国也开设了办事处，以便我们为当地客户提供更多的支持。“
The guide described a process of creating envelope packages to be handed out to protesting truckers directly via a “phone wallet that is properly backed up on paper.” At the time of this writing, the Google Doc appears to have been abandoned, with several items left unfinalized, but it outlined a process in which organizers utilized the security-focused Tails operating system, then the Electrum Bitcoin wallet to generate private keys, which would be handwritten in pen on two separate pieces of paper. These papers would then be sealed in an envelope, labeled as “trucker 1 — seed 1,” for instance, then sealed inside another envelope, alongside written directions for how to import the seed into a secure phone wallet and, ultimately, spend the donated bitcoin.
15月XNUMX日通过 Twitter, St. Louis informed donors that he planned to distribute the bitcoin to 200 protesting truckers in a “verifiable way” by handing out paper bitcoin wallets containing seed words pre-loaded with 10,000,021 satoshis, along with instructions for how they could secure and utilize the funds.
17 月 14.6 日，圣路易斯在推特上发布了一条最新消息，称他和一名合作伙伴在 90 小时内向大约 24 名卡车司机分发了 XNUMX BTC，他们逐辆出租车亲自分发。
“There’s eight grand in bitcoin in there,” St. Louis tells a trucker in one video posted to Twitter on February 18, as he hands the trucker an envelope covered in sparkly stickers. “Basically, open it up, there’s instructions. All you do is a recovery code, it’s going to tell you to download BlueWallet, which is what the recovery code is for… Boot it up, it’s yours, thanks for your service.”
视频随后显示，司机和圣路易斯透过卡车驾驶室的窗户握手，然后圣路易斯继续前行。
“I just met that guy a couple, I don’t know, a week ago, and he had a Bitcoin toque on,” the driver explained after turning back to the camera. “I said, ‘What’s up with that?’ He said, ‘Actually, if you don’t mind…’ So I let him sit in the truck or whatever, and we downloaded his wallet or whatever and he said there’s some massive, freedom loving people who love Bitcoin and stuff like that, so he said we’re probably going to get some big donors in the future, so whatever. And apparently there’s eight grand of bitcoin in here… I guarantee it’s legit… That’s definitely one of the craziest things that’s happened in the last two weeks.”
A 简短的纪录片 公布 原因’s Zach Weissmueller indicated that the HonkHonk Hodl fundraiser raised more than $1 million worth of bitcoin before it was shut down by St. Louis, and that it delivered more than $600,000 into the hands of protestors.
失败的中心点
On February 16, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) issued an order to all FINTRAC-regulated entities, demanding that they cease transacting with a list of 29 bitcoin addresses that it had associated with the protest.
17 月 14 日，就在圣路易斯宣布他和一名合伙人亲自向抗议卡车司机分发了超过 XNUMX 个 BTC 的同一天，针对 Freedom Convoy 参与者的私人集体诉讼收到了一项司法命令，称为“Mareva 禁令”。它冻结了与一组列出的被告有关的加密货币，并限制他们将该加密货币转移到诉讼中指定的银行账户和钱包地址。
该诉讼的被告包括 Lich、Dichter 和 St. Louis。它命令 TallyCoin 和其他数字资产平台冻结与已识别钱包相关的任何交易。该诉讼是由一群渥太华居民发起的，他们声称由于抗议活动，他们被迫关闭企业或失去工作。这是 加拿大历史上首次 据报道，这样的禁令被用来冻结加密货币，而代表原告的律师 聘请了一名私家侦探 追踪自由车队的组织者。
“The velocity with which the Canadian government was able to target and freeze the flow of money speaks volumes about how much power lies in the freedom of transacting,” said Econoalchemist, a pseudonymous Bitcoin privacy expert who publishes guides online focused on how to accumulate and protect BTC while obscuring your real-world identity. “This is where Bitcoin shines, a decentralized, peer-to-peer electronic cash system. With no central authority to deny transactions based on some floating moral standard, peers within the Bitcoin network can transact free from anyone’s permission. No government blacklist or class action lawsuit can stop a Bitcoin transaction from going through.”
As evidence of Bitcoin’s ability to enable transactions despite government regulations, HonkHonkWallets.GitHub.io, a website run by convoy fundraisers to automatically scan the Bitcoin blockchain, indicates that 59 of 100 wallets distributed to truckers had been claimed and that 29 of those had seen at least one additional transaction, as of block 732,726. Much of this activity occurred well after the Mareva injunction was granted.
但是， Bitcoin is pseudonymous, rather than anonymous, and all transactions are recorded on Bitcoin’s public and immutable ledger, meaning that every transaction is subject to scrutiny in perpetuity. Bitcoin may have proven to be a powerful method for circumventing centralized fundraisers for the Freedom Convoy, but it demonstrated its current limitations as well.
“The limitations of transacting with Bitcoin are mostly from connecting external information to on-chain activity,” Econoalchemist explained. “For example, using on/off ramps that require KYC information. This is where permission and censorship creep into the Bitcoin 生态系统。”
截至 18 月 XNUMX 日，加拿大警方成功查获 冻结近6个BTC 为抗议卡车司机筹集资金。
据 21 月 XNUMX 日报道，“虽然加拿大皇家骑警不会对此案发表评论，但它向 CBC 新闻发表了一份声明，称其有能力扣押和追回数字货币资产，并指出过去皇家成功起诉加密货币犯罪分子的案例。” CBC 新闻报道。
也许是通过链上监控方法引导的， police raided St. Louis’ home in late February and, according to him, seized 0.28 bitcoin stored in a wallet that he controlled along with Lich and Freedom Convoy organizer Chris Barber.
“警察强行将我从公寓带走，并带我到一辆没有标记的警车上，”圣路易斯告诉记者。 金融邮报，根据三月份发表的一篇文章。 “警方想要我的加密钱包的种子短语。在警察的强迫下，我提供了我的助记词。”
什么时候 Bitcoin 杂志 他于 7.5 月中旬抵达圣路易斯，拒绝对本文发表评论，解释说他仍然受到 Mareva 禁令的约束，并担心进一步的法律问题可能会使另外 XNUMX 个捐赠的 BTC 面临被政府扣押的风险。
“I would have used a Bitcoin donation tool that generates a new address for every donor,” Econoalchemist said about how he might have operated the Freedom Convoy fundraiser differently in hindsight, while acknowledging that these privacy measures would disrupt transparency about how the donations were distributed. “I would have been sending all donations to [bitcoin mixing service] Whirlpool at periodic intervals during the fundraising campaign… I would have asked the truckers for their deposit address instead of creating the wallets on their behalf… Then I would have sent them their bitcoin from the Whirlpool post-mix balance.”
自由的灯塔
17 月 12 日，即马雷瓦禁令获得批准的当天，渥太华警方在议会大楼周围修建了 100 英尺高的围栏，并在整个抗议地区设立了 100 多个检查站。巴伯和利奇等人被捕。第二天，警方在骑马警察、身穿高能见度夹克的徒步同事、穿着迷彩服和装甲车的战术小组的跟随下，逮捕了至少 21 人，并拖走了 XNUMX 辆汽车。
到 19 月 XNUMX 日下午晚些时候，该市最后一批重要的抗议者聚集到 Bank 街和 Sparks 街的拐角处，黄昏时演变成一场由 XNUMX 人组成的街头派对，还有即兴的 DJ。然后，一排警察喷洒胡椒喷雾，将人群向南驱散一个街区，到达皇后街，然后剩余的抗议者开始驱散。
不久之后，自由车队的组织者指示参与者撤离这座城市。截至撰写本文时，加拿大卡车司机仍需遵守 COVID-19 疫苗接种要求。
尽管自由车队在渥太华毫不客气地结束，但世界其他地区仍在举行的众多正在进行的诉讼和激发的抗议活动表明，它在引起人们对卡车司机事业以及个人自由日益增长的压力方面非常成功在西方世界。
“作为一名加拿大人，看着来自全国各地的抗议者聚集在渥太华，以及在高速公路立交桥和路边挥舞加拿大国旗的人数……自从我们上次赢得大选以来，加拿大并没有表现出那么多的情绪。在对阵美国的奥运会曲棍球比赛中获得金牌，”福斯回忆道。 “这是一次出柜，这是人们表达自己的自由并挥舞着加拿大国旗，我认为这没有什么问题。我永远不会认为这有什么问题。一群卡车司机才重新点燃了加拿大人的热情。”
And the saga served as one of the most high-profile test cases for Bitcoin as a sovereign financial rail in its thirteen-year history. As Bitcoiners continue to tout the technology as an off-ramp from undue censorship and surveillance, its use as a system for getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in value directly into the hands of those who had been blacklisted by the Canadian government may be the most potent illustration of that power to date.
Perhaps most significantly of all, it demonstrated on the world stage that fiat can only be used how governments decide, while Bitcoin is for freedom.
“我爱 Bitcoin, though I actually love my country more,” said Foss. “That being said, it’s gonna be a tight horse race, because my country’s going in the wrong direction and Bitcoin’s going in the right direction.”
原始来源： Bitcoin 杂志