Vitalik Buterin Called Canada’s Protester Policies “Dangerous”

Vitalik Buterin called Canada’s protestor policies “Dangerous” saying that decentralized systems are not about being lawless but a return to the rule of law so let’s read furhter in today’s latest Ethereum news.

The Canadian government’s efforts to cut the flow of funds to protesting truckers in Canada shows why exactly cryptocurrencies exist, according to Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin. In an interview today at the ETH Denver Conference, Buterin who grew up in Canada, didn’t condone the truckers who are protesting on the streets of Ottawa saying that they have been blaring their horns for the last week in opposition to the COVID-19 restrictions:

“If the truckers are blocking the roads and that’s breaking the economy, fine, blocking the roads is illegal and there are laws against that.”

He did say that the government’s response to the protests was quite heavy-handed. Vitalik Buterin called Canada’s protestor policies dangerous as they want to cut off the funds from the banks to those that protest and basically cut out the financial livelihoods without due process which is basically an example of why the decentralized technology is there to make this more difficult. In this way, crypto is not a radical technology but a restorative one:

“It’s not about being lawless. In some ways, it’s about bringing rule of law back. Governments and police can still act lawfully and pursue suspects “as they always have” without conscripting financial middlemen.”

The concept of doing after intermediaries and using intermediaries to bypass all that is quite dangerous and having decentralized alternatives to the intermediary is a good way to limit the damage. This week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government invoked emergency powers in an effort to stop the protests so banks and other service providers were authorized to freeze and suspend all accounts associated with the convoy without a court order and were protected from civil liability for doing so.

The supporters of the truckers tried to avoid these blockages by raising crypto donations but the government blacklisted a number of addresses associated with the efforts and a court injunction ordered the funds frozen pending the outcome of the private class-action lawsuit so it remains to be seen how effective these measures will be because transactions cannot be vetoed and the wallets are controlled by anyone that possesses the cryptographic private keys. To use the funds, however, the recipients will need to convert the crypto into fiat which usually requires going through a regulated exchange subject under the government’s directives.