Gov’t Response to Canada Protests Brings another Ex-Bitcoin Skeptic into Crypto Fold

Canada’s so-called “trucker protest” may be all but over, but its lasting effects are only just beginning to be felt. As reported, the government took unprecedented steps to contain the protesters and their blockades of many streets of the country by freezing bank accounts and trying to freeze their cryptoassets in order to deny access to the protesters and deny them their own funds.

But the reaction to the move was rejected by many critics at home and abroad – and seems to have turned a leading former crypto skeptic into a possible future Bitcoiner.

David Heinemeier Hansson, also known as DHH, is the mastermind behind the server-side web application framework Ruby on Rails as well as co-founder of the software giant Basecamp and the e-mail provider HEY. He is also a Le Mans racing driver. DHH has previously been open about his opposition to Bitcoin (BTC), which he once described as an “environmental disaster”.”

But in a remarkable volte-face, he tweeted to his almost followers today:

“I still can’t believe this is the protest that would prove that every Bitcoin is a prophet. And so that I have to cut a piece of humble pie and admit that I was wrong about the basic necessity of crypto in Western democracies.”

In a blog post, he acknowledged:

“Since the early 2010s, some of my wildest Twitter battles have been against the HODL army with the laser eyes.”

But, he added, the reaction of the Canadian government was “one of those world events with which you can imagine a documentary of the future: “It all started when.'”

DHH castle: “Where this takes us next, I now realize that I was too hasty to completely reject crypto based on all the things that are wrong about it at the moment.”

Bitcoin and crypto advocates welcomed DHH’s change of heart. They largely claimed that it was a sign of the times – and agreed with the entrepreneur’s opinion that it was ironic that Canada, of all countries, had tried to deal with protesters in this way.

Others claimed that DHH did not make clear differences between BTC and “crypto” in his reasoning. Ivan Raszl, the founder of Ads of the World, said that solutions such as the Bitcoin Lightning Network could help address DHH’s concerns about “transaction capacity” and advised:

“You should look at the Lightning Network [.] Payment layer. Payments are instant, extremely cheap, and the capacity is hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.”

Messari CEO Ryan Selkis “welcomed” DHH in the fold, noting that “Western progressive skeptics” had been “awakened” for “the need for crypto. He wrote that “civil rights-oriented progressives may soon be separated from totalitarians and Marxists,” based on “their cryptopolitics.”

“The former,” he said, were “welcome,” but, he wrote,”the latter should be exterminated.”