If you were unsure before, look no further than Canada: We need crypto!

As outsiders looking in, the situation in Canada looks quite dreadful. How does the most relaxed and polite country in the world become a dictatorship over night? Now sure you might argue this or that, but even those that agree with Trudeau and want the protests stopped might be shivering in their boots now. That's because we can finally see what crypto enthusiasts and proponents have been saying for years and years: how money that is controlled by banks can be used by the government as a tool of oppression. The money you have in a bank can be frozen or taken away at any moment with just the enactment of one policy or law. Never before have the people around the world be able to collectively be witness to a cautionary tale play live and unfiltered right before their eyes. 

"I was wrong about crypto"

This is the phrase that a lot of the crypto skeptics must have uttered when they noticed what is happening in Canada right now. No matter their political views people are waking up to the reality that their money in their own bank accounts is not safe from government intervention. One of these people is David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, who recently admitted that he was wrong about crypto. Ruby on Rails, or Rails, is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT License. Hansson, a Danish programmer, is also a partner at the web-based software development firm Basecamp. Heinemeier mentions what many of the crypto skeptics have been thinking for years and that is the fact that cryptocurrencies might be needed in states like China or North Korea and the sorts where the government has complete control over every aspect of their citizens including their finances but they are not needed in the wester countries were everything is sunshine and rainbows and nothing bad can ever happen with our beloved governments. 

 For those of you who don't know the situation goes like this. Truckers in Canada started a protest in order to end vaccine mandates which were hindering their business and thus also affecting the economy at large. The protest was the most polite and peaceful protest you have ever seen, as expected of Canadians, even if you argue that honking the truck horns can be annoying. If you compare this protest with the ones from BLM in the US the difference is night and day. One is violent and caused death and unimaginable property damage, the other one has people signing and putting on slides for children. You decide which one is the dangerous one. Well apparently Trudeau believes that the truckers are domestic terrorists for...standing up to him or something, it was not clearly explained, all that was said was the same rhetoric we have heard a million times before, namely buzzwords like misogynists, homophobes, sexists and of course lets not forget the most evil of all evils, white supremacists aka Nazis. He then quickly decided to enact the emergencies act which practically gives him dictator powers (as if he already didn't have them). By doing so he started to freeze people's bank accounts, both the truckers and what is even more egregious, the people that donated money to the truckers also had their finances taken away from them. 

But if we were to look at the good thing that came out of this disaster is the fact that David Heinemeier and other people like him received a powerful wake up call. They would never believe that a country which is believed to be not so different from the UK, France, Germany or even the US could instantly turn tyrannical and steal people's money. Some of those people can loose everything now just because they made an anonymous donation of $50 Canadian dollars. When tyranny can come sweeping in in just a matter of weeks people started to realize the value of cryptocurrency, money that is not controlled by the government. In fact Justin Trudeau did try to block crypto transactions. But there was a world of difference between his vision of what would happen and what actually happened. 

 Trudeau order crypto wallet providing companies to seize people's assets. The sheer magnitude of power overreach and abuse here is outstanding. Thankfully he has not real power over them with one bitcoin wallet, namely Nunchuck even responding to the order by explaining in autistic detail to the Canadian government how crypto wallets work: they cannot "freeze" their customer's assets, they cannot prevent them from moving them and they do not have any knowledge of "the existence, nature, value and location" of their user's assets. The last part of their message told the authorities to look up on how private keys work and also when the Canadian dollar becomes useless they will be there to serve them as well. 

You should probably buy some crypto now

“Canada warning everyone to get their coins off the exchanges because they will take them is the most incredible advertisement for Bitcoin I’ve seen in my entire life,”. This was a statement by podcast host Dennis Porter, who just like many others realized that the situation with freedom convoy and Trudeau is a cautionary tale which everyone should pay attention to. Meanwhile Samson Maw, the chief strategist of Blockstream also blasted the situation with the protest crackdowns by saying: “Canada is a cautionary tale for why money needs to be money, and not a tool for surveillance. What’s legal or illegal can change with a hand wave of emergency powers,”. And they are perfectly right! Despite the volatility of crypto, it is still our safest bet when it comes to safety from tyrannical governments overreach. Now, some banks and governments around the world are rejecting cryptocurrencies in favor of making their own digital currency which would in turn be regulated by them and the government. But that money is still not safe and not different from the centralized system that we have now. The only way to have a safe alternative to fiat money is to hold crypto. 

 But if having control over your money and being save from the powers that be is not enough to convince you, than maybe the possibility of striking it rich will. There are quite a few people out there advising to buy bitcoin, or other crypto now and hold it without thinking about selling. Of course trusting random people telling you what to do with your money does not sound like good advice. But if those people are the ones that are best at making money like Mexico's third richest billionaire, Ricardo Salinas Pliego, maybe their words weight differently. He recently gave advice to people to buy bitcoin when the price is low and forget about selling, saying that we would thank him later. Sure it could all be silly advice from a person that is already rich but is it though? I guess the real question is what will happen to crypto in the future? With the world destabilizing by a possible Russia - Ukraine conflict some people will flock to gold as an assurance. Does this mean that crypto will die off. The answer is: impossible. At this point in time with so many interests at stake crypto is literary impossible to just disappear. Will it have periods of loosing value? Of course, and these periods of time will differ depending on what is happening in the world but eventually more and more people will realize that it is a safe asset and the price will rise again. Even if this looks like wishful thinking on the part of crypto enthusiasts, our advice is the same: everyone should hold at least one type of cryptocurrency as an assurance in case things take a turn for the worse like they did in Canada. No matter how good or peaceful or democratic your country seems like at the moment, think about how the Covid restrictions hit you and how easily it was to enforce them by the governments granting themselves extra powers.