Bitcoin For Truckers, The Campaign That Could Render GoFundme Irrelevant

Go Fund Yourself using Bitcoin, this slogan has been at the core of a recently launched campaign on Tallycoin. A crowdfunding platform powered by BTC and the second layer payment solution lightning network, which offers its users 0% fees, its own website Plug-in, and a companion node software.

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The platform takes nothing from the donors. It only gives the users an opportunity to leverage Bitcoin’s censorship and seizable resistance and receive aid from people around the world. Every BTC raised goes to the campaign and its control by it.

The organizers of the Freedom Convoy 2022, a campaign to support Canadian-based truckers protesting their government’s COVID-19 and vaccination mandates, learned this lesson the hard way. Over 50,000 truckers rallied to drive into Ottawa while launching a GoFundMe campaign to support their cause.

Quickly, the campaign managed to raise around 10 million Canadian dollars, around $9 million. As often happens when a group of people stand up and start to make demands to their government, they faced opposition.

Later, GoFundMe announced that the platform was going to freeze the campaign’s funds. Initially, these were going to be redistributed to other donations which triggered a lot of criticism across social media platforms.

Per a Tweet from the Ottawa Police Department, the fundraising platform “listened to concerns” from local authorities. They argued that the protests are “unlawful” and called on all crowdfunding sites to adopt a similar stand. Bitcoin doesn’t care about policies, as future events demonstrated.

The organizers took to Tallycoin and launched “Bitcoin for Truckers” to support their “Freedom Convoy” with the following message, they ask to help raised hard money for hard workers:

The Canadian Bitcoin community would like to have a second financial access point for #FreedomConvoy2022. Legacy financial infrastructure can sometimes be politicized and clamped down upon, whereas Bitcoin is a truly censorship resistant method of communicating value. Don’t allow your voices to be silenced, and don’t allow your financial sovereignty to be trampled upon.

Bitcoin Fixes This, Lightning Network Sees Explosion In Transactions

An account called Honk Honk Hold has been updating on its progress, the campaign has collected over 2 Bitcoin in less than three days with a 5 BTC goal. More than 2,000 contributors have been constantly sending out donations with messages, such as “Sorry not sorry Minister Trudeau” or “FREEDOM!”.

An important percentage of the donations were settled using the Bitcoin Lightning Network. This has been translated into an explosion of transactions on this second layer solution, according to the campaign’s handle.

Lightning node transactions going parabolic. pic.twitter.com/KNjIK5uwBz

— HonkHonk Hodl (@HonkHonkHodl) February 5, 2022

Interest in the campaign has been increasing over time, as seen below. It took the campaign almost 4 days to raise 1 BTC but collect their second BTC in less than 24 hours. Certainly, seems like Bitcoiners are showing support to this cause.

The ripple effect caused by the decision made by GoFundMe and the Freedom Convoy has been unexpected. A recent report from Reuters claims the Governor of U.S. state Florida, Republican Ron DeSantis, will “work with the Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody to investigate the decision of “commandeer” the donations.

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The government official referred to the actions as “fraudulent”. Although the platform has “simplified” the process, the harm is already done. Bitcoin advocate Marty Bent wrote the following on his blog, Issue #1157:

This move by GoFundMe and the Canadian government is an incredible endorsement of Bitcoin and its reason for being. The fact that GoFundMe has the power to unilaterally freeze $9M of funds that were crowdsourced for a legitimate cause shows that centralized third parties are a gaping security hole that Bitcoin fills. If a government decides they don’t like a particular movement they can use their influence to pressure corporations to prevent that movement from doing particular things.

As of press time, BTC trades at $41,574 with moderate gains on the daily chart.