ALEX GLADSTEIN
Human Rights Activist
NOTES ON BITCOIN, TECHNOLOGY & FREEDOM
Bio
Alex Gladstein is Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation. He has also served as Vice President of Strategy for the Oslo Freedom Forum since its inception in 2009. In his work Alex has connected hundreds of dissidents and civil society groups with business leaders, technologists, journalists, philanthropists, policymakers, and artists to promote free and open societies. Alex’s writing and views on human rights and technology have appeared in media outlets across the world including The Atlantic, BBC, CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, NPR, TIME, The Washington Post, WIRED, and The Wall Street Journal. He has spoken at universities ranging from MIT to Stanford, briefed the European Parliament and US State Department, and taught at Singularity University. He frequently speaks and writes about why Bitcoin matters for freedom, and co-authored “The Little Bitcoin Book” in 2019.
Articles
A selection of some of my writings can be viewed here or by selecting a theme or menu item above.
In the Fight Against Extremism, Don’t Demonize Surveillance-Busting Tools like Signal and Bitcoin
Time 26/1/2021
In the past few weeks, millions of Americans have joined Signal, a free open-source encrypted chat app. Users are fleeing from WhatsApp in droves, sparked by a pop-up disclosing that the messenger will share personal data with Facebook, and by broader concerns over big tech in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
The Quest for Digital Cash
Bitcoin Magazine OCT 13, 2021
How Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin project married the concepts of digital cash and digital gold and how pioneering cryptographer Adam Back continues the work of making it a better tool for freedom.
One summer day in August 2008, Adam Back got an email from Satoshi Nakamoto.
Interviews
A selection of some of my writings can be viewed here or by selecting a theme or menu item above.
How Bitcoin Can Help In The Fight For Human Rights
Forbes 6/25/2019
Your financial transactions say a lot about where you’ve been, what you were doing, and what you intended to do — making them a perfect way to surveil you. And cutting off access to your money is one of the best ways to prevent you from doing your work or conducting your life.
How Bitcoin Is Freeing People in China, Venezuela, Iran, and…America
Since launching a decade ago, the decentralized, peer-to-peer cryptocurrency bitcoin has been lauded (and denounced) for its potential to route around traditional state-based monetary systems and allow individuals to trade directly with one another.
Hidden Repression:
How the IMF and World Bank Sell Exploitation as Development
The IMF and World Bank were created to help countries survive financial crises and to help them develop into prosperous economic actors. But their 75-year track record shows the opposite: their loans and structural adjustment policies have plunged poor countries into impossibly large debt traps and forced the Third World to focus on producing goods for consumption in the West, instead of growing consumption and industry at home. The Bank and the Fund’s “development and assistance” has been anything but. The reality is a history of neocolonial exploitation with shocking results.
Alex Gladstein has a lot to say about Bitcoin, human rights, financial privilege, and personal freedom. In his first book Check Your Financial Privilege, he says it, starting with the fact that anyone born into a reserve currency like the euro, yen, or pound has financial privilege over the 89% of the world population born into weaker systems.
As CSO of the Human Rights Foundation, Gladstein is uniquely positioned to detail the rise of Bitcoin from cypherpunk dream to the real-life Bitcoin stories happening to real people across the globe. For people around the world, outside of Wall Street, Bitcoin offers a means of freedom from inflation, political strife, and an outdated monetary system. For these people, the majority of the world’s population, it might even save their lives.
In reading through Alex’s brilliant and comprehensive treatise, you will be investigating the big economic lie of our world at its root: that the powerful help the weak. Following that, you will face an important choice. What system do you choose?
-Jeff Booth, Author, Price of Tomorrow and GP, Ego Death Capitol
Although Gladstein’s book rages against the injustice that characterizes the neoliberal economic model and the Bretton Woods institutions, it ultimately offers a glimmer of hope by demonstrating how Bitcoin, with its liberating philosophy, decentralized technology, and immutable functionality can help free nations and peoples from the debt trap.
—Farida Nabourema, Togolese writer, human rights defender, and Pan-Africanist
Alex Gladstein has written a powerful examination of an immensely important question that is usually overlooked in academia and media: What gives the World Bank and IMF such exorbitant power over the politics and finances of developing countries? By examining the monetary foundations of the question, Alex offers an astute assessment of the perverse incentives facing international financial institutions, and a compelling explanation for why the real beneficiaries of their programs are western financial institutions and governments, while the victims are the world’s poorest people.
—Saifedean Ammous, Author, The Bitcoin Standard and The Fiat Standard
Proceeds from the sale of this book support the Human Rights Foundation.
alexgladstein.com 