Honk, Honk, HODL: How Bitcoin Fueled The Freedom Convoy And Defied Government Crackdown

This article originally appeared in Bitcoin Magazine’s “Censorship Resistant Issue.” To get a copy, visit our store.

The Freedom Convoy, a sweeping protest prompted by COVID-19 vaccine mandates for Canadian truckers, saw authorities work outside of established laws to quell demonstrations and block financial support. Among the chaos, Bitcoin proved itself to be a sovereign financial rail as hundreds of thousands of dollars in BTC reached protestors in spite of government efforts to block donations.

On January 22, a convoy of Canadian long-haul trucks left the port city of Prince Rupert, British Columbia, and arrived in nearby Prince George. The next day, another group of trucks traveled from Delta, British Columbia, to a section of the Trans-Canada Highway. By the end of the month, some 3,000 trucks and other vehicles, accompanied by more than 15,000 protesters, had converged on the country’s capital of Ottawa, blocking its streets and calling itself the Freedom Convoy.

The city’s police promptly launched a criminal investigation into their assembly.

The protestors were initially motivated by COVID-19 vaccine mandates for cross-border truck drivers implemented by the Canadian government on January 15. On February 7 and for several days afterward, protestors intermittently blocked Ambassador Bridge, the busiest international crossing in North America, which sees $323 million worth of goods cross daily. Ottawa businesses were damaged and blocked from operating, with Canadian economist Armine Yalnizyan later estimating that local workers’ suffered $208 million in lost wages.

The protestors were almost immediately successful in disrupting business as usual and attracting media attention and on February 11, Ontario Premier Doug Ford declared a state of emergency. On February 14, the Canadian government took unprecedented extralegal measures by invoking the Emergencies Act for the first time since it was enacted more than 30 years ago, giving authorities the temporary power to reach beyond the scope of existing law to quell the protest. Later that month, similar protests were organized in more than 30 other countries, including the U.S., Argentina and New Zealand.

And through it all, the Freedom Convoy quickly became one of the most high-profile test cases for the use of Bitcoin as a permissionless and censorship-resistant way of transacting value to whomever, wherever, whenever.

“This will be a historical moment for Bitcoin,” explained B.J. Dichter, a Toronto resident born and raised in Canada, who was a long-haul trucker himself before becoming a spokesperson for the Freedom Convoy. “Because we always talked about this hypothetical, the government tyranny of blocking your bank accounts, stealing your money and whatever… Well, now they just did. So, it proved everything. Everything that people said about Bitcoin like, ‘Oh, that’s hyperbolic. That’s never gonna happen.’ Well, guess what? Yesterday’s conspiracy is today’s reality. And I think in the future, people are going to see, that was the moment that regular people and everybody understood that the government can’t track it, can’t block it, and shouldn’t be able to.”

Pushed To Protest

In 2018, Canada’s trucking industry pulled in about $31.5 billion, moving more than 63 million shipments, according to Statista. From 2009 to 2018, it generated $277.1 billion in all. For many Canadians over the last few years, working as a long-haul trucker was seen as an opportunity to earn a flexible and dependable income.

“I got my license before the regulations changed in Canada that made it very restrictive to get a trucking license,” Dichter explained. “My brother thought it would be good when he retires that maybe we’ll start doing a business together and he wanted to go into trucking… So, I got my license and was getting a little bit of experience, part time when I had days off… Trucking became a side hustle.”

Dichter recalled his role in the Freedom Convoy while sitting in the halls of the Miami Beach Convention Center during the Bitcoin 2022 conference in April, where he had been invited to speak about the role that Bitcoin played in sustaining the protest. He described himself as a “serial entrepreneur,” who has worked as a geologist and diamond grader, in the motorcycle industry, as a podcast producer and more. His own interest in Bitcoin was piqued in 2015 and he first invested in bitcoin the year after.

He said that stringent regulations imposed on Canadian truck drivers had been a longstanding point of contention between drivers and regulators since well before the Freedom Convoy was organized. In 2019, for instance, 150 truckers from Alberta took a four-day convoy drive to Parliament Hill in Ottawa, calling themselves the United We Roll convoy. According to local news coverage at the time, the truckers were protesting a slew of government impositions, including oil and gas taxes.

Dichter called this year’s vaccine mandates the “straw that broke the camel’s back” for Canadian truckers.

“Most of us are vaccinated,” he explained. “It was the mandates, the lack of choice. That was the problem.”

Dichter described a personal experience that took place just days before the convoy occupation of Ottawa; border agents had tracked his vaccine status by surveilling his phone within a certain vicinity of the U.S. border as he drove back home. To him and many other Canadians, this level of government monitoring was indicative of a growing willingness by government officials to track personal details about their citizens without permission.

“If that’s the case, then we have a completely tracked and surveilled society, like this is crazy where we’re going, we’ve got to stop this now, and all of us saw it,” he said. “It was these final restrictions of ‘Papers please,’ to cross the border into your own country that was just enough.”

About a week before protestors left for Ottawa, Dichter was contacted by Freedom Convoy organizer Tamara Lich, a longtime friend who has organized numerous protest movements in her native Canada. She was arrested on February 17 for her role in the Freedom Convoy and, as of this writing, is legally barred from returning to Ontario except for court-related reasons. Lich asked Dichter for help with media relations.

“I love these truckers, I’m friends with them, but none of them have any media experience or any media training whatsoever,” Lich told Ditcher, as he recalled. “Can you be the spokesperson, help with the press releases, all that sort of stuff?”

Freedom Convoy organizers launched a fundraiser on centralized donations processor GoFundMe in January 2022, hoping to raise about $20,000 for fuel and other basic supplies needed to sustain their protest. To their surprise, by the end of January they had raised about $4 million from more than 100,000 donors and GoFundMe had distributed about $800,000 to the organizers.

But in early February, GoFundMe paused the distributions over concerns that the fundraiser was not in compliance with its terms of service, which include prohibitions on “user content that reflects or promotes behavior in support of violence.”

“Recent events in Ottawa, Canada, have generated widespread discussion about the Freedom Convoy 2022 fundraiser on GoFundMe,” according to a company statement from February 2. “As part of our information gathering process, we also requested more information from the organizer regarding the use of funds to ensure the fundraiser is still compliant with our Terms of Service. When we do not receive required information, we may put a pause on donations as we did in this case.”

That’s when the Canadian government started getting directly involved in the transmission of funds from donors to protestors.

On February 3, a committee from the Canadian House of Commons asked GoFundMe officials to testify over security concerns about where the donated funds were coming from and where they might be going. Members of Parliament also asked the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) to testify. The next day, GoFundMe removed the campaign.

Several other centralized fundraising platforms started collecting funds for the Freedom Convoy, but it was clear that the Canadian government had drawn a line in the sand. Fundraisers on Christian-focused donations platform GiveSendGo had collected more than $8.5 million for the protestors, but the Ontario Superior Court of Justice granted a court order to freeze the funds. By late February, Canada had invoked the Emergencies Act and had frozen more than 75 bank accounts linked to the protests.

“Three years ago, if you had asked me what’s the chance that Canada would freeze individuals’ bank accounts… I’d find it really hard to believe it was 20%,” said Greg Foss, an outspoken Bitcoin advocate and fifth-generation Canadian. “And three years later, it’s 100%… It was not a good thing for freedom.”

A Permissionless Avenue

As Dichter and others organizing the Freedom Convoy wrestled with centralized fundraisers, Bitcoiners who had been supporting the movement throughout took it upon themselves to raise BTC donations through Tallycoin, a bitcoin-based fundraising platform.

“The Bitcoin community was awesome,” said Dichter. “Of all the things I had to deal with — these little groups infighting and people, you know, trying to do their own press conferences — the one community that I could depend on was the Bitcoin community, because they had all their ducks lined up. They were great, they just kind of kept me up to date.”

Tallycoin enables donations directly to a fundraiser’s Bitcoin wallet and offers the option to list an extended public key so that each individual Bitcoin payment generates a unique address. This is a critical privacy best practice that makes it more difficult for observers to associate these payments together. The platform also offers Lightning Network donations for fundraisers that use Bitcoin payment processors or by directly connecting their own Lightning nodes.

Using Tallycoin, a Bitcoiner named Nicholas St. Louis, who used the pseudonym NobodyCaribou, spun up a fundraising campaign called “HonkHonk Hodl,” receiving its first donation on February 1. As the Freedom Convoy’s fiat fundraisers were shut down and frozen, this Bitcoin-based campaign announced that it had surpassed its 5 BTC goal, worth about $213,000 at the time, on the same day that the Canadian government invoked the Emergencies Act.

But getting the bitcoin from HonkHonk Hodl’s Tallycoin addresses into the hands of protesting truckers, many of whom knew very little about the technology, would be a challenge. St. Louis teamed with J.W. Weatherman, a Bitcoin developer and donor, to establish a plan and they published a lengthy, public Google Doc called “Step-By-Step Guide For Distributing Bitcoin.”

The guide described a…