The HRF has created a fund to provide financial support to developers working on making Bitcoin more private and secure to use
The Human Rights Foundation has set up a fund to provide financial backing to software developers, who are working on ways to make Bitcoin payments more private. While Bitcoin payments do carry a high degree of anonymity, they do not offer it completely.
The reason why the HRF are keen to help develop this kind of technology is to support various activists across the world. Activists are often subject to a lot of financial pressure and can have their accounts frozen by governments who are in opposition to their beliefs.
Hence, a decentralized currency such as Bitcoin presents an obvious method through which donors across the world can support and fund activists who otherwise would not receive their money. However, such payments might still be able to be traced by governments using the blockchain.
However, a service called Coinswap can bypass government financial surveillance, which might otherwise be able to track Bitcoin transactions.
While Satoshi created Bitcoin as part of a direct rejection of central banks, it’s no a leap of logic to speculate he would have wanted to bypass organisations restricting payments to advocates of human rights.
The HRF are demonstrating another way in which Bitcoin can be used to circumvent restrictions put in place by governments trying to defund protests and thereby limit their accountability. The HRF’s project will potentially enable Bitcoin to be used to protect the financial interests of activists and protestors.
In their dispatch detailing the creation of the fund, the HRF states that they hope other organisations follow their example. They make it clear that their developers are only able to work thanks to the generosity of others.
