As I step onto the aircraft leaving Gardermoen Airport in Oslo, Norway, the burden and heat of the previous week settles into my chest.
The Oslo Freedom Forum will not be a convention. It’s not a summit. It’s one thing more durable to call and even more durable to explain — a convergence of braveness, fact and defiance that burns by means of the noise of the fashionable world and provides you no selection however to hear, really feel and act.
For the second time, I go away this metropolis extra satisfied than ever that one thing unstoppable is rising. That amid the censorship, surveillance and state repression spreading throughout the globe, there’s a countervailing power rooted in humanity, accelerated by expertise and led by those that’ve already paid the value for talking out.
The Discussion board doesn’t commerce in empty optimism. It delivers a distinct form of hope, solid from lived expertise and stitched collectively by individuals who have been at midnight and nonetheless select to see the sunshine. A hope borne from the tales of people who’ve lived by means of the worst an authoritarian regime can do and nonetheless select to combat for the liberty of others. The experiences shared had been arduous. At instances, devastating. However they weren’t provided for pity. They had been calls to motion.
Simply days after she was kidnapped, blindfolded, tortured, and sexually assaulted in a Tanzanian jail cell, Agather Atuhaire stood in entrance of a crowd of strangers and advised her story.
Her voice didn’t tremble.
The Ugandan journalist and lawyer had traveled to Tanzania in solidarity with fellow East African dissidents, solely to be disappeared in a black van alongside Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi.
And but, towards all odds, she got here again. Not simply to her house in Uganda, but in addition to the stage in Oslo, the place she spoke calmly and clearly about what it means to inform the reality underneath a dictatorship.
Her presentation, “The Digital Free Speech Crackdown in Uganda,” laid naked the authoritarian playbook: social media blackouts, propaganda campaigns, surveillance of journalists and the sluggish monetary asphyxiation of impartial media. When the federal government doesn’t like a narrative, it merely blocks the platform or web site. When a journalist digs too deep, they disappear for some time. Or ceaselessly. Atuhaire painted an image many wrestle to even think about.
And but, after every little thing, she didn’t simply recount these struggles. She regarded out on the crowd and thanked the open supply builders and contributors who write code and create instruments that make it doable for activists like her to talk, transfer cash and set up underneath regimes that need them silenced, or worse.
(Ugandan journalist and lawyer, Agather Atuhaire, speaks in the course of the Freedom Tech observe on the 2025 Oslo Freedom Discussion board.)
From Iran, impartial Bitcoin educator Ziya Sadr reminded us that monetary privateness will not be a luxurious however a crucial lifeline for these dealing with the monetary repression by oppressive rulers. Sadr’s detainment in the course of the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom motion following the homicide of Mahsa Amini by the Iranian regime is a testomony to that. With out monetary privateness, activists’ actions, connections and funds are uncovered to a regime outfitted with widespread monetary controls and a complicated, restrictive web firewall that rivals even China’s.
The end result is without doubt one of the most repressive digital environments on this planet. And if that wasn’t sufficient, the Iranian rial currency has misplaced greater than 80% of its worth in just some years.
In opposition to this backdrop, Iranians are utilizing bitcoin as undebasable financial savings, and to purchase digital providers like VPNs as a way to entry the open web. However even that act, simply reaching the skin world, requires a stage of privacy most of us take without any consideration.
In his presentation, “Securing Lifelines: The Bitcoin Privacy Imperative,” Sadr shared that many Iranians flip to Bitcoin Coinjoins, a privateness method that breaks the hyperlink between Bitcoin transaction inputs. Coinjoins protect consumer transaction privateness and, extra importantly, defend Iranians from the surveillance and retaliation of a regime who punishes anybody making an attempt to entry info past its tightly managed digital areas. The usage of Coinjoins is turning into tougher as international authorized stress mounts towards open supply builders, and within the aftermath of the Samourai developer arrests, privateness protocols like Whirlpool are unworkable.
At this time, Sadr is studying extra about further Bitcoin privateness instruments, together with Paykoin, a privateness methodology that permits two customers to contribute an enter to a Bitcoin transaction. Payjoin breaks widespread chain evaluation heuristics and conceals the sender and receiver of a transaction in addition to the cost quantity. Then there may be ecash, a type of digital money backed by Bitcoin that allows very personal, on a regular basis funds with the custodial trade-off of trusting mints (entities that challenge and redeem ecash tokens) to retailer consumer funds.
The continued growth of those protocols is essential for Iranians, who dwell underneath a authorities that not solely tracks and surveils digital habits, but in addition imposes automatic fines on girls for violating hijab guidelines and manipulates foreign money change charges to revenue off residents’ financial savings. For hundreds of thousands in Iran, bitcoin gives a final line of protection towards a collapsing foreign money, intrusive surveillance and whole monetary repression.
(Impartial Iranian Bitcoin educator, Ziya Sadr, speaks in the course of the Freedom Tech observe on the Oslo Freedom Discussion board.)
Venezuelan opposition chief Leopoldo López took the stage on the 2025 Oslo Freedom Discussion board not as a politician, however as a witness to what occurs when a state turns its establishments into additional tendrils of its repression machine.
After Nicolás Maduro stole Venezuela’s 2024 elections, López watched hundreds of his fellow folks — activists, college students, journalists, opposition members and attorneys — get arrested, disappeared or pressured into exile. The regime blocked entry to social media, revoked passports, criminalized dissent and used the monetary system as a method of controlling the inhabitants.
Amid this digital repression and Venezuela’s 162% inflation charge, López sees bitcoin (decentralized cash) and Nostr (decentralized social media) as lifelines. When dictators shut down the web or freeze your checking account, alternate options which might be open supply, decentralized, uncensorable and accessible change into extra essential than ever for the survival of democracy and freedom.
“Decentralized resistance is the convergence of individuals, Bitcoin, Nostr, and AI.
Individuals, it’s in regards to the middle and the tip of what we’re doing.
Courageous ladies and men who sacrifice their freedom, who take dangers, who’re keen to combat for different folks.
If it’s not about folks, expertise wouldn’t be one thing value preventing for.
Bitcoin is freedom cash. It’s decentralized, no person controls it, no person can cease it, it might probably transfer round with out borders.”
(Venezuelan Opposition Chief Leopoldo López in the course of the Freedom Tech observe on the 2025 Oslo Freedom Discussion board.)
For many years, Paraguay’s best pure useful resource, hydroelectric energy, has flowed overseas by means of worldwide contracts, fueling growth in neighboring nations like Brazil and Argentina whereas one in four Paraguayans remained trapped in poverty. Paraguay’s Itaipu Dam, one of many largest on this planet, has lengthy symbolized this paradox: a river of vitality diverted away from the very individuals who want it most.
Björn Schmidtke and Delia Garcete of Penguin Group are flipping that script.
In a landmark transfer, they secured Paraguay’s first 100-megawatt energy buy settlement, marking the start of a daring experiment to reclaim that vitality for the folks of Paraguay. As a substitute of promoting it off to overseas powers, they use it to mine Bitcoin — and the proceeds go to Paraguay’s youth.
(Itaipu dam, Paraguay)
Out of the warmth of buzzing ASICs and the roar of the Itaipu generators rises Penguin Academy, a free software program growth college that equips younger Paraguayans with coding, growth and technical abilities. Over 10,000 college students have utilized, together with 800 girls; greater than 3,000 have already graduated. And over 85% of the graduates from their Code Professional program now work within the tech trade.
What was as soon as wasted or exported is now being remodeled into freedom and a future. By means of bitcoin, Paraguay’s stranded energy is discovering its manner house.
Rushan Abbas is a Uyghur activist who has spent years elevating the alarm in regards to the Chinese language Communist Get together’s marketing campaign to erase her folks. Through the Freedom Tech observe, she spoke not simply as a human rights advocate however as a sister whose sibling, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, was kidnapped by the CCP in 2018 and hasn’t been heard from since. Her voice was calm, however her phrases had been heavy.
Abbas described a area became a digital and bodily jail. The Uyghur homeland, East Turkistan, has been deliberately remodeled into one of many world’s most refined police states, the place mass surveillance, facial recognition programs, police checkpoints, asset seizure, organized marriage, sterilization and compelled labor are used not simply to regulate the Uyghur inhabitants, however to suppress them out of existence.
As Rushan describes it: “Break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins.”
Rushan made clear that financial management is central to the CCP’s technique. Uyghurs have their property and financial institution accounts frozen, their land seized and their houses stolen. They’re stripped of any skill to avoid wasting, transact or construct generational wealth, and are pressured into government-run labor schemes underneath the guise of “poverty alleviation.”
Rushan reminds us that what’s occurring to the Uyghurs will not be summary. It’s a focused, systematic erasure carried out with weaponized expertise and monetary repression. Her sister’s disappearance is one in every of hundreds of thousands of silenced lives, however she refuses to let it’s forgotten. In Oslo, Rushan stood not simply as a witness, however her phrases served as a warning: When a authorities can monitor each transaction, surveil each citizen and management each motion, it doesn’t simply repress however completely dismantles the foundations of a folks’s identification, autonomy and future.
(Uyghur activist Rushan Abbas speaks in the course of the Freedom Tech observe on the 2025 Oslo Freedom Discussion board.)
For these causes and extra, you don’t go away the Oslo Freedom Discussion board feeling defeated. You permit reminded that fact is extra highly effective than propaganda, that code can shield life and that resistance isn’t simply doable — it’s already occurring.
And when you’re lucky sufficient to dwell in a spot the place talking freely or shifting cash isn’t a life-risking act, you’re reminded of the privilege that comes with that freedom and the duty you need to stand with those that are nonetheless preventing for it.
This yr, I felt a noticeable pulse of momentum round freedom tech. As we noticed above, human rights defenders and dissidents didn’t simply discuss in regards to the repression they endured. They emphasised the optimism in regards to the instruments that assist them peacefully combat again: Bitcoin, Nostr, privateness instruments, open supply AI fashions, uncensorable VPNs — instruments that work within the shadows, beneath firewalls, round embargoes and past borders. Instruments that construct a parallel system, the place the precise to transact, talk, set up and resist can’t be revoked on the press of a button.
These are the devices holding actions alive, getting cash to dissidents and defending voices in danger. And behind each software is a quiet builder, a pseudonymous contributor or an open supply developer who might by no means take the stage however is simply as a lot part of the story.
The Oslo Freedom Discussion board isn’t just a gathering of voices. It’s a frontline, a spot the place the long run is crafted by those that refuse to offer in. And what emerges from that convergence is a straightforward, plain fact: Authoritarianism adapts, however so will we. With Bitcoin, with open supply instruments, with decentralized networks, with unstoppable braveness.
At 30,000 toes, effectively above the noise and borders they attempt to implement, one factor is obvious: No authoritarian regime, irrespective of how brutal or effectively funded, has ever succeeded in stamping out the human need to be free. The Oslo Freedom Discussion board is proof of that. And when you’re paying consideration, it’s additionally a glimpse into what comes subsequent.
This isn’t the tip. It’s only the start of the subsequent chapter. One written not by the highly effective, however by the free.
Onward.