A GoFundMe campaign raised more than £55,000 for a Gazan family trying to escape the war.

Most of the money raised never reached them.

Banking rules and sanctions prevent direct payouts in Gaza, so the funds had to go through an intermediary. When that arrangement collapsed, the family was left without the support raised for them.

Bitcoin platforms like Agora and Geyser send funds directly to recipients’ own wallets, using community verification instead of giving control to a single intermediary.

Read how these tools are helping people in crisis.

My latest piece in Forbes featuring @Soapbox @Geyser @Lyudmyla Kozlovska @Human Rights Foundation / @HRF (RSS Feed) @Femi Longe .

https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2026/07/16/when-the-financial-system-cant-reach-people-in-crisis-bitcoin-can/

Privacy has become a dirty word, but it remains something profoundly normal.

Fraud is real and so are the risks created by linking identity, transaction history and bitcoin ownership.

Privacy is the reasonable expectation that your personal life, your movements and your finances are not automatically open for inspection.

FATF’s new fraud roadmap calls for more data to be collected on more people and shared across more agencies.

We already know where this can lead:

- exchange breaches
- doxxed customers
- wealth linked to home addresses
- physical attacks

All involving people whose details were sitting in compliance databases.

You cannot leak what was never collected. Bigger databases do not stop criminals and more data does not equal greater safety. They create larger honeypots, with ordinary users often becoming the easiest targets.

Data collection is now set to expand under the UK’s FATF Presidency. I wrote about where this roadmap could lead for Forbes.

I didn’t realise how much I'd written until I pulled it all into one place.

150+ articles across bitcoin, energy, freedom and CBDCs!

Great suggestion @metamick!