Whichever side of the aisle you sit on in regard to the Canadian trucker protests, one conclusion is beyond dispute: governments are willing and able to reach into your digital wallets and take your crypto.
Where they take it to, and what they do with it once it gets there, is perhaps an open question.
But the fact remains that under the recently invoked Emergencies Act, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau has given the government authority to sanction 34 well-known crypto wallets, and theoretically to seize funds held in them.
Whether or not the Canadians are successful, a clear marker has been laid down.
Governments are coming for your crypto.
Earlier on in the Trucker protests it was clear that financial networks were becoming a key battleground.
Crowdfunding platform GoFundMe early on took the side of the Canadian government and announced that donations to the protesting Truckers would actually be diverted to a charity of the funding platform’s own choice.
After an outcry, the launching of investigations at several levels of government in the USA, and an accusation of fraud from US Presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis, GoFundMe agreed to return the cash to donors rather than give it to other charities. But the fact remained that the cash never got through to the Truckers, even though at that point there was nothing illegal either in making or receiving such donations.
Round one to the Canadian government.
Next, alternative funding platform GiveSendGo stepped into the gap.
Again, the Canadian government tried to step in, but with a lesser degree of success, since the founders of GiveSendGo weren’t quite so aligned politically with the Canadian government as the founders of GoFundMe.
Pro-Trucker groups labelled GoFundMe as “GoFraudMe”, and hailed GiveSendGo as a new lifeline.
But there’s more than one way to skin a cat.
If GiveSendGo wouldn’t willingly stop funds flowing to the Truckers, the Canadian government had other directions from which it could target that money.
On the one hand, it could label the Truckers terrorists, and thus argue that the GiveSendGo platform was being used to fund terrorism, which it duly did. For good measure, Prime Minister Trudeau added in the other standard calumnies du jour – the Truckers were racist and misogynist.
Annoyingly, the Trucker protests were almost entirely peaceful, and involved dance parties, children playing on bouncy castles, and pets.
Trudeau’s claims only really looked credible to people wearing the same sort of tint on their spectacles as the government itself.
Another alternative was to wait and see if anything happened to GiveSendGo – which it duly did. Its website got hacked and taken down, and the names of donors to the Truckers made public. In certain cases this was unfortunate, as people inside the echelons of government were revealed as donors, and in other cases it was dangerous, as threats were issued.
Some had claimed violence on the Truckers’ side too, but to date no such story has been proved.
Meanwhile, as Ottawa’s then chief-of-police Peter Sloly, a long-time policing veteran, continued to keep his powder dry, the Truckers were turning to other sources of funding to keep going.
The battle for financial control turned to Crypto.
Here, the government needed the extra powers of the Emergencies Act before it could move. Prime Minister Trudeau was under heavy pressure from the Conservative right in both Canada and the US not to invoke it, but he duly did, right after Peter Sloly was ousted.
Time will tell whether Sloly will be remembered as a moderating force that tempered a tinderbox situation or just as a man who had dithered and failed to prevent the development of a “carnival of chaos” – the term used by the chair of the Ottowa Police Service Board Diane Deans, who was later ousted herself.
Either way, with the police in Ottawa back on side, the government felt more secure in making its next moves, both on the ground and on the financial front. Although the protestors and their trucks would be given a few further days’ grace, their crypto was now under direct attack
On 18 February the Crypto exchange Kraken said that it wouldn’t be able to prevent the Canadian government freezing assets held on its platform.
Indeed, Kraken’s chief executive Jesse Powell was utterly unequivocal.
“We will be forced to comply,” he said on Twitter. “If you're worried about it, don't keep your funds with any centralized/regulated custodian. We cannot protect you. Get your coins/cash out and only trade peer-to-peer.”
One reply to that Tweet asked whether Prime Minister Trudeau had just killed bitcoin by “showing how easy it is to lock up?”
To be fair, though, Powell himself isn’t neutral on the issue. He has publicly argued against the mandating of vaccines, and has defended people who take such a position against the charge of being “anti-vax.”
Note, though, that the issue of the vaccine mandates that started all this chaos has largely been lost in the ensuing melee about controlling streets and money. Is it really even about Covid and keeping people safe, or is it about much, much more?
Is it, in fact, about the broader relationship between the state and the individual?
If it is, then crypto, which after all is trackable through blockchain technology, is never going to be completely effective at keeping the state at a financial arms’ length.
The only asset that has ever effectively, and consistently done that throughout the ages is gold. And towards the end of last week, gold punched through the US$1,900 mark, headed once again towards an all-time high.
Financial pundits the world over ascribed this strength in gold to ongoing tensions between Russia and the West over the Ukraine.
But might there not have been another reason why buyers went heavily into gold?
It was because last week was the week the world’s governments started to come for your crypto.