The Iranian people 🇮🇷 have been cut off from the Internet for 3 consecutive days.
In the digital age, cutting access to the network is the ultimate weapon of a coercive State to isolate its population and block any escape route (even financial).
A friend on the ground finds himself in a situation where he has BTC, with the difficulty of finding a means of exchange to buy basic necessities.
If the Internet shutdown continues, fewer and fewer Iranians may accept crypto (including stablecoins, yet the most widely used) as long as the return of Internet access remains uncertain.
This is a critical vulnerability that I was mentionning in this report on Bitcoin adoption in Iran
🔗 https://offchain.media/article/bitcoin-revolution-iran
Let us not believe we are safe in the West. This fragility concerns us too.
If we do not build resilient infrastructures now (Mesh networks, Nostr, BitChat, etc), we will be just as helpless the day the switch is turned off.
In the digital age, cutting access to the network is the ultimate weapon of a coercive State to isolate its population and block any escape route (even financial).
A friend on the ground finds himself in a situation where he has BTC, with the difficulty of finding a means of exchange to buy basic necessities.
If the Internet shutdown continues, fewer and fewer Iranians may accept crypto (including stablecoins, yet the most widely used) as long as the return of Internet access remains uncertain.
This is a critical vulnerability that I was mentionning in this report on Bitcoin adoption in Iran
🔗 https://offchain.media/article/bitcoin-revolution-iran
Let us not believe we are safe in the West. This fragility concerns us too.
If we do not build resilient infrastructures now (Mesh networks, Nostr, BitChat, etc), we will be just as helpless the day the switch is turned off.