Crypto's High Ideals About Freedom Take a Beating

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Earlier this year, the crypto community went into an uproar over news that Canadian banks had frozen financial accounts tied to protesting truck drivers who had been blockading a key boarder crossing. The truckers were angry about vaccine mandates and other Covid-19 measures, but as the narrative went, you didn’t have to agree with them to recognize that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had used the financial system to punish political adversaries, an episode that reinforced the need for cryptocurrencies that were fully resistant to any interference.

That was all well and good, until it wasn’t.

Just months later, the interference-resistant, permissionless money industry is itself getting into the business of locking up people’s assets. On Thursday, Voyager Digital Ltd. became the latest crypto firm to limit customer withdrawals from its platform, adding to similar moves recently from Celsius Network, Babel Finance, CoinFlex and others. The moves show an industry that doesn’t stand up for many of its core ideals when push comes to shove.

To hear the zealots talk about it, crypto was supposed to be an antidote to state hegemony, meddling central banks and a financial system that failed Americans in the run-up to the Great Recession, and some of that was arguably true of foundational innovations like Bitcoin, provided owners stored their coins outside of centralized exchanges. A key wrinkle in the Canadian trucker protests was that the government actually went after crypto, which stunned some people who thought they were beyond the reach of the state. In fact, that’s rarely true when you entrust the keys to your crypto to an outside custodian.

Of course, not everyone is comfortable keeping their coins in “cold storage” hardware