Financial Freedom And The Fight Against Censorship

At the 2023 Bitcoin Amsterdam conference, organised by Bitcoin Magazine and attended by more than 2,000 people at Westerpark, keynotes from Edward Snowden and Stella Assange centred on censorship. Speaking by video link from Russia, Snowden argued that existing structures were designed to exploit and urged the audience to build decentralised, permissionless tools, describing bitcoin as “one of our strongest levers.”

Stella Assange, whose husband Julian Assange remained in prison at the time, warned about the manipulation of reality by powerful organisations and linked financial sovereignty with the wider struggle for truth and freedom. Other sessions covered the risks that CBDCs posed to financial privacy and why traditional banks were reluctant to accept bitcoin, and Snowden discussed Nostr as a way to resist censorship. The piece presents bitcoin as a peaceful protest against a fractured financial system.