Overview
What this book is about
Check Your Financial Privilege is a collection of twelve essays originally published in Bitcoin Magazine throughout 2020 and 2021, compiled into a book by Alex Gladstein — Chief Strategy Officer of the Human Rights Foundation. The book's central argument is that Western critics of Bitcoin are "blinded by financial privilege": only 13% of humanity is born into stable reserve currencies (dollar, euro, yen, pound, etc.), while 87% live under autocracies or currencies subject to chronic inflation, debasement, and government seizure. For the 4.3 billion people living under authoritarianism and the 1.6 billion living under double- or triple-digit inflation, Bitcoin is not a speculative toy but a lifeline.
The book is structured as a series of ground-level reportages combined with macro-economic history. Gladstein interviews Bitcoin users in Nigeria, Sudan, Ethiopia, El Salvador, Togo, Senegal, Palestine, Cuba, and Afghanistan, letting their lived experience rebut the dismissals of Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and other members of the dollar-privileged elite. These personal narratives are woven into broader analyses of the petrodollar system, French monetary colonialism in Africa (the CFA franc), the history of the cypherpunk movement, Bitcoin's "Trojan Horse" adoption mechanism, and Michael Hudson's thesis on American super imperialism.
The closing chapters argue that the US dollar system — built on the petrodollar pact of 1974 and the "Treasury Bill Standard" that replaced gold after Nixon's 1971 shock — is itself a form of global exploitation, forcing foreign nations to finance American military spending and welfare. Bitcoin, as decentralised asset money with a fixed supply and self-custody properties, is presented as the only realistic successor to dollar hegemony: one that cannot be confiscated, debased, censored, or weaponised by any single government.
Proceeds from the book go to the Human Rights Foundation.
Key Ideas
The core frameworks and findings
1
Financial privilege is structural
Being born into a reserve currency gives automatic advantages over people in weak-currency countries. The 87% born outside the G7 currency bloc face inflation, debasement, capital controls, and exclusion from global financial systems as default conditions of life.
2
Bitcoin as protest and lifeline
In Nigeria, activists used Bitcoin after their bank accounts were frozen during the #EndSARS protests. In Sudan, a Sudanese doctor sends remittances home via Bitcoin, bypassing a financial system destroyed by 30 years of Bashir's rule. In Ethiopia, young professionals hedge against chronic birr devaluation. These are not speculative bets — they are survival strategies.
3
The Cantillon effect in authoritarian states
Countries like Sudan and Nigeria illustrate the Cantillon effect at scale — those closest to the money printer (regime cronies) benefit from seigniorage while ordinary citizens see wages eroded. Bitcoin breaks this chain by removing the money-printer entirely.
4
The petrodollar's hidden costs
The 1974 Nixon-Kissinger-Simon pact with Saudi Arabia created the petrodollar system: oil priced in dollars, Saudi petrodollar surpluses recycled into US Treasuries. This arrangement supports the Saudi dictatorship, hollows out American manufacturing (the Triffin dilemma), helps maintain fossil fuel dominance, and may have provided a hidden motive for the 2003 Iraq invasion when Saddam Hussein began pricing oil in euros.
5
Bitcoin as Trojan Horse
Bitcoin spreads via self-interest ("number go up" / NGU), but embedded within it is a freedom technology ("freedom go up" / FGU). Corporations, governments, and billionaires accumulate Bitcoin for profit, unknowingly importing a system that erodes centralised monetary control. Authoritarian regimes that "stack sats" will eventually discover they have brought into their city gates something that cannot be censored, confiscated, or debased.
6
French monetary colonialism (the CFA franc)
France maintains monetary control over 15 former African colonies through the CFA franc. These nations must keep 50% of their foreign exchange reserves in the French Treasury, use a currency manufactured in Paris, and grant France first right of refusal on exports. Ten of the 15 CFA nations are among the UN's "least developed countries." Bitcoin offers an escape route; several Togolese and Senegalese activists are using it as a direct challenge to the system.
7
El Salvador's Bitcoin Beach experiment
The Lightning Network circular economy launched in the coastal village of El Zonte ("Bitcoin Beach") demonstrated that Bitcoin could function as daily money for a community with no prior banking access. This grassroots experiment directly influenced El Salvador's decision to make Bitcoin legal tender in September 2021 — the first country to do so.
8
Palestine and financial sovereignty
Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and Hamas governance face a double financial repression: cut off from global banking by geopolitical sanctions and denied monetary sovereignty. The Paris Protocol of 1994 locked Palestine into the Israeli shekel. Bitcoin, usable at any Israeli-Palestinian checkpoint that has internet, offers a stateless, uncensorable payment rail.
9
Cuba's Bitcoin revolution
After Cuba eliminated its dual-currency system in 2021, the peso lost half its value overnight. Cubans who had saved in Bitcoin preserved their purchasing power. Bitcoin also enables Cubans to receive international remittances without the 8–12% fees charged by Western Union or the Cuban state.
10
Afghanistan and refugee finance
Roya Mahboob, Afghanistan's first female tech CEO, used Bitcoin to pay teachers' salaries when the banking system collapsed under Taliban rule. Afghan women with no ID documents — ineligible for any bank account — can hold Bitcoin on a phone, impossible to confiscate without knowing the passphrase.
11
Bitcoin mining as humanitarian tool
Remote renewable energy plants (hydro in the Congo, solar in South Africa) can immediately monetise stranded energy by mining Bitcoin, even without transmission lines to population centres. As local demand grows, miners step down and communities take over — a bootstrapping mechanism for electrification that bypasses the aid-dependency trap.
12
Super imperialism and the end of dollar hegemony
Drawing on Michael Hudson's 1972 book Super Imperialism, Gladstein traces how the US used Bretton Woods institutions and the Treasury Bill Standard to force foreign central banks to finance American wars and deficits. The dollar replaced gold not through market preference but through political coercion. Bitcoin — self-custodied, confiscation-resistant, and with a fixed supply — is the first serious candidate to replace the dollar as a neutral world reserve asset.
13
The cypherpunk origins of Bitcoin
The cypherpunk movement (Eric Hughes, Tim May, John Gilmore, Adam Back, et al.) emerged in the early 1990s to use cryptography to preserve privacy and freedom against the emerging surveillance state. Their mailing list produced the intellectual DNA of Bitcoin: the Hashcash proof-of-work system (Back), the DigiCash experiments (David Chaum), Bit Gold (Nick Szabo), and finally Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper in October 2008.
14
Bitcoin's fixed supply as the key property
The 21-million-coin cap means no government, corporation, or individual can debase Bitcoin the way they can any fiat currency. This single property — enforced by the protocol itself — is what makes Bitcoin useful for people living under inflationary regimes.
15
Bitcoin and Black America / marginalised minorities
Within the United States, Black Americans and other historically excluded groups have been denied property rights, suffered asset confiscation, and been excluded from wealth-building through systemic financial discrimination. Bitcoin, which cannot discriminate by race or nationality, offers a property rights infrastructure that does not rely on state enforcement.
Contents
Chapter by chapter — click to expand
§
Preface
▾
- Defines "financial privilege" as the structural advantage of being born into a stable reserve currency
- 87% of the world lives outside the G7 currency bloc; 4.3 billion under authoritarianism, 1.6 billion under double-digit inflation
- Bitcoin as the mechanism to "obliterate financial privilege" — the protocol treats all participants equally
§
Chapter I — Check Your Financial Privilege
▾
- Bitcoin in Nigeria: Ire Aderinokun (co-founder of Buycoins) on naira devaluation, the Cantillon effect, and how activists used a BTCPay Server to fundraise during #EndSARS when bank accounts were frozen
- Bitcoin in Sudan: "Sudan Hodl" (a Sudanese doctor in Europe) on Bashir's 30-year "economic terrorism," the hanging of a man for holding foreign currency, 340% inflation, and Bitcoin as a remittance rail bypassing a destroyed banking system
- Bitcoin in Ethiopia: Birr devaluation, internet shutdowns, and young Ethiopians using Bitcoin as a hedge
§
Chapter II — The Quest for Digital Cash
▾
- Birth of the cypherpunk movement; Diffie-Hellman public-key cryptography (1975); "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto" (Eric Hughes, 1993)
- The Crypto Wars: US government attempts to suppress encryption software (PGP, Phil Zimmermann)
- Pre-Bitcoin digital cash attempts: DigiCash, Hashcash (Adam Back), B-money (Wei Dai), Bit Gold (Nick Szabo)
- The Byzantine Generals Problem and Nakamoto's solution: distributed timechain, proof-of-work
- Bitcoin's launch (January 9, 2009), privacy limitations on-chain, and the Lightning Network / Confidential Transactions as improvements
§
Chapter III — The Hidden Costs of the Petrodollar System
▾
- Birth of the Bretton Woods system (1944), Keynes' "bancor" vs. dollar standard
- Nixon Shock (August 15, 1971): dollar devaluation, end of gold convertibility
- The 1974 Nixon-Kissinger-Simon pact with Saudi Arabia: petrodollars recycled into US Treasuries
- Downstream effects: support for Saudi and Gulf dictatorships, hollowing of US manufacturing (Triffin dilemma), fossil fuel entrenchment, dollar weaponisation
- The 2003 Iraq War and the petrodollar motive (Saddam's euro oil pricing)
- Global de-dollarisation trends; Bitcoin as neutral multipolar reserve asset
§
Chapter IV — Bitcoin Is a Trojan Horse for Freedom
▾
- The Trojan Horse metaphor: Bitcoin looks like digital gold (NGU) but contains freedom technology (FGU)
- Corporations, ETFs, sovereign wealth funds buying Bitcoin for profit, inadvertently strengthening a censorship-resistant network
- Bitcoin's game theory: self-interest and freedom are aligned; no altruism required
- The Blocksize War as example of failed attempts to co-opt Bitcoin for corporate ends
- Self-custody vs. gold's vulnerability to Executive Order 6102-style confiscation
- Lightning Network's privacy improvements driven by fee economics, not ideology
§
Chapter V — The Village and the Strongman (El Salvador)
▾
- El Zonte "Bitcoin Beach" circular economy: Mike Peterson, Jorge Valenzuela, community-level adoption with no prior banking
- Lightning Network's role in micropayments (sub-$1 transactions viable)
- El Salvador's dollar trauma: dollarisation in 2001 stripped the country of monetary sovereignty and seigniorage
- Bitcoin Beach as the catalyst for El Salvador's Bitcoin Legal Tender Act (September 7, 2021)
- President Bukele's authoritarian tendencies and the risk of "strongman Bitcoin adoption"
- Self-custody ("not your keys, not your coins") as the safeguard against state capture
§
Chapter VI — Fighting Monetary Colonialism with Open-Source Code
▾
- The CFA franc system: 15 Francophone African nations, 50% of reserves held in the French Treasury, notes printed in Paris
- History of French coercion: Guinea (1958 currency poisoning), Mali (1962 coup), Togo (president Olympio assassinated two days before leaving the CFA), Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso (assassinated 1987)
- Farida Nabourema (Togolese activist) on how the CFA funds French living standards with African reserves
- Fodé Diop (Senegalese engineer) on Bitcoin as an escape from the 1994 overnight 50% devaluation
- "Separation of money and state" as the defining principle of Bitcoin's relevance in the CFA zone
§
Chapter VII — Can Bitcoin Be Palestine's Currency of Freedom?
▾
- Palestinian financial repression: the 1994 Paris Protocol locked Palestine into the Israeli shekel with no monetary sovereignty
- Yasser Arafat's corruption: Palestinian Authority as an extractive institution
- Gaza and West Bank Bitcoin users: accessing payments despite checkpoints and banking exclusions
- The Israeli Bitcoin community's perspective; ideological alignment between some libertarian Israelis and Palestinian Bitcoiners
- Practical limits: on-ramps/off-ramps, electricity access in Gaza
§
Chapter VIII — Inside Cuba's Bitcoin Revolution
▾
- Cuba's dual-currency elimination (2021): the CUP/CUC unification destroyed peso savings overnight
- Bitcoin as "monetary purification": Lucia and other Cuban professionals who preserved value
- The US embargo and its complex interaction with Bitcoin adoption (US fintechs blocked from Cuba)
- Building a Bitcoin circular economy in Havana; peer-to-peer peso/BTC markets on Telegram
- Cubans using Bitcoin to receive diaspora remittances at lower cost than Western Union or the state Cadeca
§
Chapter IX — Finding Financial Freedom in Afghanistan
▾
- Roya Mahboob's story: first female Afghan tech CEO, used Bitcoin to pay teachers' salaries when the banking system collapsed
- Afghan refugees using Bitcoin to carry savings across borders without physical cash confiscation risk
- Economic collapse after the Taliban takeover (August 2021): banking freeze, ATM queues, dollar hoarding
- Women with no ID documents holding Bitcoin wallets — inclusion by protocol, not by bureaucracy
§
Chapter X — The Humanitarian and Environmental Case for Bitcoin
▾
- Three structural failures of international aid: corruption/middlemen (up to 80% leakage in conflict zones), dependency creation, failure to enable energy independence
- Bitcoin as direct peer-to-peer aid rail: Myanmar democracy activists receiving donations via Lightning in 2021
- Virunga National Park (DRC): 15 MW hydro plant mining Bitcoin with stranded energy, funding park operations independent of a corrupt state
- Bitcoin mining as a "bootstrap" for remote renewable energy: miners act as buyer of last resort at 2–5 cents/kWh, enabling power plants to monetise before grid connection; they step down as local demand grows
- Counter to "Bitcoin wastes energy": miners use excess/stranded/curtailed energy, not grid power competing with households
- Humanitarian payment tools: Strike, Muun Wallet, Blue Wallet, Paxful, Lightning Network
§
Chapter XI — Bitcoin and the American Idea
▾
- Bitcoin's values align with the American founding ideals: property rights, free speech, checks on arbitrary power
- Bitcoin and Black America: historical exclusion from wealth-building (redlining, asset confiscation, exclusion from post-WWII homeownership programmes); Bitcoin as property rights infrastructure that cannot discriminate
- "From Baghdad to Bitcoin": Iraqi-American Faisal Saeed al-Mutar on how Bitcoin connects people across geopolitical divides that fiat money enforces
- Bitcoin as more threatening to authoritarian closed societies (China, Russia) than to open ones like the US
- Risk of US regulatory overreach; the case for treating Bitcoin as a protected civil liberty
§
Chapter XII — The End of Super Imperialism
▾
- Detailed analysis of Michael Hudson's Super Imperialism (1972, updated 2021)
- America's transition from creditor nation (post-WWI gold accumulation) to debtor nation that forced creditors to finance its deficits
- The Bretton Woods collapse, Nixon Shock (1971), and the creation of the Treasury Bill Standard
- How the US demonetised gold: from Executive Order 6102 (1933) through the London Gold Pool to the 1971 default
- "IOU-nothings": foreign central banks trapped holding depreciating dollar liabilities with no alternative
- OPEC recycling as the mechanism that saved dollar hegemony in the 1970s
- Triffin dilemma: the reserve currency country must run perpetual deficits, which ultimately undermine the currency
- Bitcoin as asset money (like gold) but confiscation-resistant, easily self-custodied, and verifiable without third parties — making it a superior candidate for the next neutral world reserve asset
- A "Bitcoin peace theory": under a Bitcoin standard, governments would face real balance-of-payments constraints on military adventurism
Practical Takeaways
What to actually do with this
Hold some Bitcoin as savings insurance: If you live in a country with a relatively stable currency, Bitcoin still protects against tail risks (capital controls, confiscation, banking crises). For families in inflationary economies, it is the primary hedge.
Self-custody is non-negotiable: "Not your keys, not your coins." Use a hardware wallet or a self-custody mobile wallet (Muun, Blue Wallet) for savings. Exchange accounts can be frozen, hacked, or compelled by governments.
Use Lightning for small payments: The Lightning Network enables near-instant, near-free Bitcoin transactions — relevant for remittances, micropayments, and circular-economy spending.
Understand the petrodollar: The dollar's strength is partly structural (military-political pact with Saudi Arabia, not pure market forces). De-dollarisation is gradual but real; Bitcoin is the only candidate for a neutral alternative.
Diversify away from CFA-style currency risk: If holding savings in a currency pegged to a foreign power (or any currency with a history of overnight devaluations), Bitcoin provides a ceiling-free hedge that cannot be redenominated.
Evaluate international aid and remittances via Bitcoin: Bitcoin/Lightning can dramatically reduce remittance fees (typical wire costs 5–10%; Lightning approaches 0%) and bypass corrupt intermediaries in aid delivery.
Bitcoin mining + renewable energy: For anyone involved in energy or development projects in regions with stranded power, Bitcoin mining as a buyer of last resort is a viable and proven bootstrap model (Virunga is the live example).
Long-term thesis: If the Treasury Bill Standard continues to deteriorate (de-dollarisation, Fed balance sheet expansion, geopolitical weaponisation of SWIFT), a Bitcoin standard becomes increasingly plausible. Holding Bitcoin is effectively a bet on this transition.
See Also
Related books in the library
[saifedean-ammous/the-bitcoin-standard.md, lyn-alden/broken-money.md, jeff-booth/the-price-of-tomorrow.md]