What Dissidents Know About Bitcoin

“It’s not enough for me to be taken care of if everyone else on the planet is living in a digital gulag.” CK explains why HRF treats Bitcoin as essential infrastructure for human rights—and why dictators keep failing to build alternatives that work.

If you are opposing the guys in charge, you're not going to have access for very long.

— Christian Keroles

Timestamps

  • 00:00 Introduction and CK's path from Bitcoin Magazine to HRF
  • 04:53 Working with Yulia Navalnaya and orange-pilling HRF internally
  • 08:17 How HRF changed CK's thinking about Bitcoin narratives
  • 10:16 Why CBDCs fail: governments suck at consumer tech adoption
  • 13:18 Democratic governments and cognitive dissonance about surveillance
  • 18:49 What "debanked" actually means for activists on the ground
  • 22:16 Bitcoin 101 workshops: what 300+ activists ask about most
  • 27:17 Failure modes: where Bitcoin products still fall short
  • 34:29 HRF's $4M in grants and the theory of change
  • 37:37 eCash, Nostr, and the Bitcoin circular economy
  • 43:25 Why Americans should care about global financial freedom
  • 47:05 HRF's AI for Individual Rights Initiative
  • 49:59 What success looks like: flipping the 1 billion / 7 billion equation

Resources

About Christian Keroles

Christian Keroles (CK) is Director of Financial Freedom at the Human Rights Foundation, where he leads the CBDC Tracker, Bitcoin Development Fund, and activist education programs. Before HRF, he spent years as Managing Director and COO at Bitcoin Magazine and the Bitcoin Conference, building the infrastructure that shaped Bitcoin's public narrative. His team has distributed millions in grants to open-source developers and trained over 300 activists from 50+ countries on Bitcoin self-custody. CK discovered Bitcoin in 2017 through Laura Shin's Unchained podcast and hasn't stopped building since.

Nostr (opens in new tab) X (opens in new tab) LinkedIn (opens in new tab)