Ruby On Rails Creator Admits Being Wrong About Crypto 

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David Hans­son – cre­ator of full-stack frame­work “Ruby on Rails” – recent­ly con­fessed that his absolute anti-cryp­to stance was mis­guid­ed. In light of Canada’s recent sanc­tions against Canada’s truck­er con­voy, he now sees a use-case for cryp­tocur­ren­cy – even in West­ern democracies.

“I Was Wrong,” Says Hansson

The dev stack cre­ator explained his revised posi­tion in a blog post ear­li­er today, titled “I was wrong, we need cryp­to”. By no means a total con­vert, he was still sure to re-empha­size his many gripes with cryp­tocur­ren­cy before explain­ing his new­found appre­ci­a­tion for it. Some such crit­i­cisms include Tether’s ques­tion­able reserves for back­ing USDT, and the many scams plagu­ing the entire space. 

While Hans­son under­stood cryp­to as offer­ing inde­pen­dence from banks, he only saw this as ben­e­fi­cial in “fail­ing states like Venezuela”, or in “over­ly author­i­tar­i­an” coun­tries like Chi­na or Iran. By con­trast, “sta­ble West­ern democ­ra­cies” gov­erned by “rule of law” had lit­tle need for blockchain tech­nol­o­gy, in his view.

How­ev­er, Canada’s heavy-hand­ed response to protests against covid-19 restric­tions has since changed his mind. The Ottawa Police Depart­ment forced crowd­fund­ing plat­form GoFundMe to refund about $10 mil­lion in dona­tions to the move­ment, block­ing their trans­ac­tions. Short­ly after­ward, the Ontario provin­cial gov­ern­ment ordered GiveSend­Go to freeze dona­tions raised for the truckers. 

Final­ly, Prime Min­is­ter Justin Trudeau invoked Canada’s “Emer­gen­cies Act”. This grant­ed the gov­ern­ment pow­er to freeze bank accounts of any­body sus­pect­ed of donat­ing to the protest. Giv­en the cir­cum­stances, Hans­son was ter­ri­fied that even a coun­try like Cana­da would take such a “shock­ing­ly author­i­tar­i­an” response. 

“I still can’t believe that this is the protest that would prove every Bit­coin crank a prophet,” he wrote. “And for me to have to slice a piece of hum­ble pie, and admit that I was wrong on crypto’s fun­da­men­tal neces­si­ty in West­ern democracies.”

Hans­son con­cludes by say­ing he was “too hasty” to dis­miss cryp­to by only look­ing at its short­com­ings, instead of appre­ci­at­ing the trans­ac­tion­al free­dom it pro­vides. This comes after many years on Twit­ter lam­bast­ing the “HODL army with the laser eyes”, as he describes it. 

Evading Sanctions With Crypto

Since cryp­tocur­ren­cies facil­i­tate peer-to-peer trans­ac­tions, they are far more dif­fi­cult for banks or gov­ern­ments to cen­sor. In the case of the truck­er con­voy, one Bit­coin-native fundrais­er accu­mu­lat­ed near­ly $1 mil­lion in dona­tions, which suc­cess­ful­ly arrived in truck­ers’ possession.

Famous whistle­blow­er and Wik­ileaks founder Julian Assange has also resort­ed to cryp­to to bypass sanc­tions placed against him and his orga­ni­za­tion. A recent Ethereum DAO raised mil­lions of dol­lars fund­ing his tri­al to pre­vent his extra­di­tion to the Unit­ed States. 

Fea­tured image cour­tesy of @dhh on Twitter.

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