Am I A Social Justice Warrior?

What if the most powerful tool for human dignity in our lifetime isn't a policy or a protest movement — but a money the state can't reach?

Brian takes the values of the social justice movement seriously — lifting up the marginalized, protecting the vulnerable, resisting tyranny — and runs them through John Rawls's "veil of ignorance." If you didn't know who you'd be born as — a Manhattan banker or a single mother in Lagos, a Connecticut homeowner or an Afghan coder in Herat — which monetary system would you choose?

The answer, Brian argues, isn't the one being defended by people who use the language of justice. It's Bitcoin.

What We Cover

• Rawls's veil of ignorance applied to money
• 1.4 billion unbanked adults, and reserve currency as an 11% global privilege
• Roya Mahboob paying Afghan women in Bitcoin in 2013
• Fereshteh Forough and Code to Inspire feeding 100 families via Bitcoin after Western Union pulled out of Afghanistan
• Argentina, Zimbabwe, Lebanon — inflation as a regressive tax
• Lightning at the till in 1,500 South African Pick n Pay stores
• Fadey's two-hour escape from Kyiv with everything on a USB drive
• The Canadian truckers and why self-custody is the right to financial speech
• Gridless electrifying Bondo, Malawi where charity has failed
• Bitcoin Beach / El Zonte and the remittance problem

Key Quotes

"The worst-off don't need a more powerful state — they need a money the state can't reach.""A memorized seed phrase doesn't ask permission.""Self-custody is the right to financial speech.""Bitcoin isn't a financial product. It's a piece of human rights infrastructure that happens to also be a financial product."

People & Projects Mentioned

Alex Gladstein (Check Your Financial Privilege), Jason Maier, John Rawls (A Theory of Justice), Roya Mahboob, Fereshteh Forough (Code to Inspire), Anita Posch (Bitcoin for Fairness), Mike Peterson and the Bitcoin Beach team, Gridless, and circular economies in South Africa, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Costa Rica.

Behind the Veil — Who You Might Be

A Filipino fisherman. A network manager in Kabul. A Zimbabwean teacher who's watched her pension die three times. A 20-year-old two hours from a closed border. A Canadian who donated $50 to the wrong cause. A kid in Bondo doing homework under a light bulb. A grandmother in El Zonte.

Or a guy on an island with chickens and Bitcoin.

You don't know yet. That's the point.

www.satoshigeneral.com

linkedin.com/in/brian-bundy-b30a529

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Lately, I've been rethinking my position on social justice from first principles. I live on a small island. I raise chickens, I run a chemical business, I hold Bitcoin, and my kids go to private school. I read Rothbard for fun. I'm not the person that phrase is usually aimed at. But I want to look at this from a different angle. One that has nothing to do with internet culture or political tribes. If you actually had the opportunity to design a system to uplift the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world, what would that system look like? And more importantly, do we already have one? Big hat tip to Alex Gladstein and Jason Mayer for the inspiration and many of the examples I use in this episode. This is episode 17 of Love and Hard Money. I'm Brian, and today's question is, am I a social justice warrior? Let me be precise about what I'm doing here. I'm not going to spend this episode mocking anyone. I'm not going to pick a fight with the activist class or whoever the algorithm wants me to be mad at this week. There are thousands of podcasts that will do that for you. Go listen to them if that's what you want. What I want to do instead is take seriously, really seriously, the values that the social justice movement stands for lifting up the marginalized, protecting the vulnerable, empowering the powerless, resisting tyranny, restoring dignity to people the system grinds down. Those are good values. I'm not going to pretend they aren't. The question I want to test today is whether the system being defended by people who use that language is the system that actually delivers on those values. Or whether it's the opposite. Whether sound money of all things might be the most powerful tool for human dignity that's emerged in our lifetime. Whether Bitcoin is, in some real sense, a justice technology. And I want to do it with a thought experiment. In nineteen seventy one, a Harvard philosopher named John Rawls published a book called A Theory of Justice. Whatever you think of Rawls, and I have my disagreements with him. He gave us one of the most useful tools in moral philosophy. He called it The Veil of Ignorance. It works like this. Imagine you're about to be born, you don't know yet who you'll be. You don't know your race, your sex, your country, your family, your wealth, your intelligence, your health, your passport. You're behind a veil. You can't see any of it. From behind that veil, Rawls says, what kind of world would you design? It's a powerful question because it strips out self-interest. You can't rig the rules in your favor because you don't know which side of the rules you'll land on. You have to design a world that works for anyone who might walk through the door, including the worst off person. That's a useful test. Most of us, if we're honest, would design a very different world from the one that we live in. Now here's where I part ways with Rawls. He asked the right question to diagnose the disease, but I disagree with him on his conclusion. He believed you need a powerful state to deliver justice to the worst off. I want to argue today that the worst off don't need a more powerful state. They need a money the state can't reach. Let's apply his thought experiment to money. Forget your 401k, forget your mortgage rate, you're behind the veil. You don't know whether you'll be born in Manhattan or Mogadishu. You don't know if you'll be a man or a woman, a citizen of a free republic, or a subject of a dictatorship. You don't know if your bank will be a Chase branch or a Hawala broker. You don't know if you'll be allowed to own anything at all. Behind that veil, you're being asked to choose a monetary system for the world you're about to enter. Option one a system of national fiat currencies backed by political promises controlled by central banks, intermediated by commercial banks, surveilled by states, debasable at will, and contingent on your government deciding you're allowed to participate. The path to wealth is credit access, which is not evenly or equitably distributed. Option two, a fixed supply, open source, permissionless digital money that anyone with a phone and an internet connection can hold, send, and save without asking anyone's permission, without depending on any institution's solvency, without needing an ID, an address, a minimum balance, or a friendly relationship with the regime and power. The path to wealth is hard work and savings available to anyone. Which one do you choose? I think the answer becomes pretty obvious once you actually walk through who you might be. Let me show you. Start here. There are roughly 1.4 billion adults on this planet who don't have a bank account. They don't have one because they don't have the right paperwork, or they don't live near a branch, or they can't meet the minimum balance, or the bank doesn't want their business, or, in many cases, the country they live in doesn't really have a functional banking sector to begin with. Alex Gladstein, who runs strategy at the Human Rights Foundation, and wrote Check Your Financial Privilege, has been pounding this drum for years. His basic point, and it's a humbling one if you actually let it land, is that being born into a reserve currency is itself a form of privilege. The dollar, the euro, the yen, the pound, if you were born into one of those, you are part of an 11% global minority. The other 89% of human beings live with weaker money, less access, more friction, more risks. Think about what an American takes for granted. You can open a checking account in 20 minutes. You can deposit a check by taking a picture of it. You can send money to a friend through Venmo before your coffee gets cold. You can save in a currency that while debasing isn't going to lose 90% of its value next Tuesday. You can move money across state lines without permission. You can move it across international borders with a few forms. Now, picture being a street vendor in Freetown Sierra Leone, or a smallhold farmer in rural Kenya, or a single mother in a slum outside Manila. Sending money to a family in another city is hard. Saving anything is hard. Receiving payment from a customer outside your immediate physical presence is hard. The financial system, as it exists for you, is not really a system. It's a series of locked doors. Bitcoin doesn't ask any of those questions. It doesn't care about your ID. It doesn't care about your address. It doesn't care about your minimum balance. It doesn't care if your government likes you. It cares only that you have a phone and a connection. That's a justice issue. That's a massive justice issue. Let me tell you about Roya Mabub. Mabub was the first female tech CEO in Afghanistan. She grew up partly under the Taliban in the late 90s and partly in exile in Iran. When she came back to Afghanistan as a teenager, she built a software company in a country where most women weren't allowed to work outside the home, much less run a business. Time magazine put her on their list of most influential people in the world. Around 2013, she ran into a problem that doesn't exist for most of us. She wanted to pay her female employees, but many of those women didn't have bank accounts. The ones who did had accounts that were effectively controlled by their fathers or their husbands. Cash worked, sort of, except that any money that went home tended to stop being the woman's money the second across the threshold. So Royas started paying them in Bitcoin. In 2013, almost nobody in the West was using Bitcoin for anything other than speculation. The price was tiny, the infrastructure was rough, and here's a woman in Kabul in 2013 using Bitcoin to do something no other technology in human history could do. Pay a woman in a patriarchal society in a way that her father couldn't take it from her. A memorized seed phrase doesn't ask permission. One of Roya's employees was a woman named Layla Farzan. She worked as a network manager at the company. Over time, she earned 2.5 Bitcoin in salary and bonuses. At today's prices, that's more than a hundred times the average annual income in Afghanistan. In 2016, she started receiving Taliban threats for the crime of working with computers. By 2021, when the Taliban took the country back, she was one of millions of Afghan women whose lives collapse overnight. Except, she had Bitcoin. A few hundred miles west in Herat, another Afghan woman named Ferharesht Foro was running a coding company for girls, Code to Inspire, the first all-female coding school in the country. After the Taliban returned in 2021, Western Union pulled out, the banking system seized up, and 350 graduates of Code to Inspire, many of them now the only earners left in their household after their fathers and husbands had lost work, had no way to receive money from abroad. Faro partnered with international supporters and helped a hundred of those women set up Bitcoin wallets. They received their stipends, walked them across town to local money exchangers in the financial district of Herat, small informal exchangers who quietly started accepting Bitcoin and converted them to Afghanis or dollars to feed their families. I want you to imagine telling a woman in Herat in late 2021 that Bitcoin is a speculative asset for white guys with too much disposable income. Tell that to her face while she's feeding her kids on a lightning payment. Behind the veil of ignorance, you might be her. Alright, moving on. Pick a country. I'll go with Argentina. Since independence, Argentina has defaulted on its sovereign debt nine times. Nine. It's lived through three episodes of hyperinflation and living memory and three banking crises. The peso has been devalued, redenominated, frozen, capped, and replaced so many times that the central bank has literally lopped zeros off the currency on more than one occasion. In 2001, the peso went from one to one with the dollar to nearly four to one in weeks.$93 billion in sovereign debt went into default. The poverty rate jumped from 26% to 57% in four years. In recent years, inflation has run over 100% annually. Argentinians have lived their entire economic lives under what I can only describe as state managed theft from savers. The wealthy Argentinian protects themselves, they hold dollars under a mattress, they buy real estate in Miami. They have lawyers and accountants and offshore accounts. The poor get the peso. Inflation fundamentally is a regressive tax. It hits the people who hold cash the hardest. And the people who hold cash are the people who can't afford to hold anything else. There is no asset allocation strategy when you're a single mother making forty thousand pesos a month in a market stall. Your savings are pesos under your bed, and every month somebody in Buenos Aires presses a button and your savings shrink. This is not abstract. This is the same thing that happens in Zimbabwe, where the largest banknote ever issued, a hundred tr so big it's hard to say. A hundred trillion Zimbabwean dollar bill became famous as a kind of dark joke. It happened in Lebanon, where the banking system itself collapsed and ordinary depositors found their life savings frozen behind the doors of banks that no longer functioned. It's happening in slower motion today in Turkey, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Egypt. Anita Posh is a nonprofit called Bitcoin for Fairness, has spent the last several years on the ground in Zimbabwe and Zambia and South Africa doing Bitcoin education. Not selling, not pumping, teaching, sitting down with farmers, students, single mothers, university kids, helping them set up self-custody lightning wallets, helping them understand that there is a savings technology now that doesn't require the trust of a kleptocratic central bank. In South Africa, Pick and Pay, one of the country's largest grocery chains with around 1,500 stores, now accepts Bitcoin lightning payments at the till. Not as a marketing stunt, as a payment rail. Because in a country where the banking system serves a minority well and the majority badly, an open monetary protocol is a real alternative. Behind the veil of ignorance, you might be a Zimbabwean schoolteacher who watched her pension evaporate three times. You might be an Argentinian retiree whose life savings are worth a tenth of what they were five years ago. Bitcoin, for those people, is not a get-rich quick scheme. It's a savings technology. The first one in human history that's globally accessible, censorship resistant, and beyond the reach of the man pressing the button in the central bank. That's a justice issue. In February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, a 20-year-old man, call him Thade, that's the pseudonym he gave the journalists who told his story, needed to get out. The government was about to close the borders to all men of fighting age. He had ours, maybe less. The ATM lines were enormous. The banks were overwhelmed. He couldn't withdraw cash, but he had Bitcoin. He did a peer-to-peer trade with a friend. Two thousand dollars worth. Bitcoin for Zlodi, the Polish currency. Then he caught a bus to the border. Within two hours of crossing, Ukraine sealed itself shut to men 18 to 60. Fede got out with everything he owned on a USB drive in his pocket. Since then, the story has gotten more complex. There are now Ukrainian men paying smugglers in cryptocurrency to slip across the border into Moldovia, Romania, or Hungary, trying to escape conscription into a war they don't want to fight. I'm not going to tell you what to think about that. I have my views, and I think you can probably guess them, but that's a different episode. The point I want you to notice is structural. Bitcoin gave a 20-year-old kid the option to leave. The state didn't get to decide for him. That's the same structural fact that played out in Canada in 2022, when a group of truckers parked their rigs in Ottawa and the government decided their protest was over the line. The trucker GoFundMe was pulled with$10 million sitting in it. A backup campaign on a different platform was frozen by court order. Then Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, and Canadian banks were authorized to freeze the personal accounts of donors without a court order, without warning, without recourse. People who had given$50 to support truckers found their bank accounts frozen. You don't have to like the truckers. You don't have to agree with their politics. You just have to ask yourself a simple question. Do you want to live in a country where your bank account can be frozen for donating to a political cause your government dislikes? Bitcoin doesn't answer to any government, so when GoFundMe pulled the plug on the Canadian Truckers, Bitcoiners spun up a campaign on a lightning-enabled platform called Tallycoin. At first, a few thousand people donated about 6 Bitcoin. Roughly a quarter million dollars at the time. But it didn't stop there. The campaign ultimately raised over 20 Bitcoin, pushing past a million dollars from supporters around the world. That's almost one one millionth of all the Bitcoin that will ever exist given as donations to a single protest. The Canadian government tried to clamp down on that one too, and they had some success where the funds touched regulated exchanges or identifiable accounts, they could freeze or restrict access. But where people held their own keys, there was nothing to freeze. That's the difference. That's the lesson. Self-custody is the right to financial speech. The same lesson played out in Nigeria in 2020, during the NSARS protest against a brutal police unit. The Nigerian government pressured banks to freeze the accounts of the organizers. Bitcoin donations kept the movement alive. It played out again with Belarusian dissidents resisting Lukashenko, with Russian anti-war activists, with Hong Kong protesters, with women in Iran funding underground networks. Behind the veil of ignorance, you might be any of those people. You might be the one whose government decided your protest was the wrong kind, the wrong cause, the wrong color. The monetary system that lets the state freeze your savings to punish your speech is not a justice system. A monetary system that doesn't is. I want to add one more example because this one isn't about money. It's about electricity. There's a company called Gridless operating across Kenya, Malawi, and Zambia. They build small renewable energy mini grids in rural African villages, micro hydro plants on rivers mostly. And they put a Bitcoin mining operation next to each one. The mine soaks up the surplus energy that the village can't use. The revenue from mining helps subsidize the power for the village. In one village, Bondo in Malawi, electricity used to be effectively unavailable, or it ran$10 a month for a tiny ration. After gridless plugged in, the cost dropped to around$4. Around 1,800 households in Bondo now have power that didn't before. Kids can study at night. Refrigerators keep food cold, phones charged, small businesses operate. Six hundred million Africans don't have access to electricity. That's roughly two-thirds of the continent. Bitcoin mining, the same activity that the New York Times publishes hand-wringing op-eds about every six weeks, turns out to be one of the only economic mechanisms in existence that makes it profitable to bring electricity to remote villages. Because the mine becomes the anchor customer that makes the mini-grid economically viable. Without the mine, there's no project. Without the project, there's no power. This is not theoretical. This is happening right now. To real people with names. What's important about this project and others like it is that it's not charity. Gridless is a for-profit business. They win, and so do the customers who get access to electricity. Decades of charity work in Africa have failed to create sustainable improvements in people's lives because without profit incentive, most infrastructure is not sustainable. When I hear people say Bitcoin is destroying the planet, I want them to think about that kid in Bondo doing his homework at night under a light bulb. Energy is life, and more of it for more. People is a sign that the world is getting better. I'd be doing this episode wrong if I didn't talk about Bitcoin Beach. Bitcoin Beach started in 2019 in El Zante, a small surfing village on the Pacific coast of El Salvador. Population about 3,000 people. Mostly poor, about 70% unbanked, like most of the country. An American expat named Mike Peterson had been doing missionary and community work there for years. Then an anonymous donor showed up with a large Bitcoin donation and one condition. Don't convert it to dollars. Use it as Bitcoin. Build a circular economy. Peterson, working with locals, Roman Martinez, Jorge Valenzuela, and others, started paying kids to do community projects in Bitcoin. River cleanups, beach cleanups, then they got local businesses to accept it. Then COVID hit, and they distributed Bitcoin grants to families to keep them fed. By the end of 2020, you could pay your electricity bill, your phone bill, your medical care, and your kid's haircut in Bitcoin and El Zante. A village of 3,000 people and one of the most violent and poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere became the world's first Bitcoin circular economy. Not a speculation playground, a working economy. The remittance numbers tell you why this matters. Remittances are something like 26% of El Salvador's GDP. Salvadoran families abroad, mostly in the United States, send money home to keep their relatives alive. The traditional remittance system through Western Union and similar players can eat up to half of the value of a small transfer. Half. A working mother in Los Angeles sends$200 to her grandmother in El Salvador, and Western Union takes$100. Then the grandmother takes an hour-long bus ride that costs her two more dollars to wait in line at a counter to collect what's left. With Lightning, that same remittance settles in seconds for fractions of a penny directly to a phone. Tell me again how Bitcoin is only for white tech bros. The El Zante model is spread. Bitcoin Asecci in South Africa, Bitcoin Lake in Guatemala, Berlin, also in El Salvador, Bitcoin Jungle in Costa Rica, which I'm super excited to be visiting soon. These are all real places with real people building real economies on Bitcoin. So behind the veil of ignorance. You don't know yet who you'll be. You might be a Filipino fisherman who can't open a bank account. You might be Roya Mabub's network manager holding a seed phrase her husband doesn't know about. You might be a code to inspire graduate in Harat feeding your family on lightning. You might be a Zimbabwean teacher who's watched the same currency die three times. You might be Fidel, two hours from a closed border with a USB drive in your pocket. You might be a Canadian who donated$50 to a cause your prime minister didn't like. You might be a kid in Bondo doing your homework under a light bulb that Bitcoin mining made possible. You might be a grandmother in El Zante getting a remittance from her daughter without losing half of it to a wire transfer. Or you might be a white guy on an island with chickens and firearms and Bitcoin. But you don't know yet. That's the point. So which monetary system do you choose? The one where every one of those people I just listed is at the mercy of an institution that can refuse them, freeze them, debase their savings, surveil their transactions, or simply not exist for them in the first place? Or the one where they don't need anyone's permission? I think the honest answer behind the veil is obvious, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. I started this episode by asking whether I'm a social justice warrior. Here's where I land. I'm not going to claim the label. The phrase has been so thoroughly captured by a particular cultural movement that I think it would just confuse what I'm trying to say, and I'm wary of the kind of identity shopping that turns serious moral commitments into social media badges. But I will say this. If caring about justice means caring about the actual human beings who are most ground down by the system we live under, the unbanked, the women whose money isn't really theirs, the savers being slowly robbed, the dissidents whose accounts can be frozen, the villagers without power, then yeah, I care about that a lot. And I think that's the bar. I think the people who care about those things, and who genuinely want them solved, owe themselves an honest look at sound money. Because Bitcoin isn't a financial product, it's a piece of human rights infrastructure that happened to also be a financial product. It's permissionless dignity, it's a savings technology for the people the existing system has failed. It's the first money in history that doesn't ask who you are or where you were born. Alex Gladstein has been saying for years that Bitcoin is the most important human rights tool of the 21st century. I used to think that was provocation. Now I think it's an understatement. Behind the veil of ignorance, I know which money I would choose for the world I might be born into. I think most honest people, if they actually walked through the thought experiment, would choose the same one, whatever they call themselves, whatever's in their bio. That's it for me this week. If this episode landed for you, send it to one person who'd never expect to hear me make this argument. That's where the conversation really starts. Until next time, allow health, wealth, love, and success to multiply in your life. I'm Brian, and this is Love and Hard Money.