The future of investing is looking more open than ever before but there’s still work to be done, according to Alex Gladstein, the Chief Strategy Officer of the Human Rights Foundation. He joined Yieldstreet’s Senior Director of Product Marketing on The Yield to discuss the humanitarian right to investing, crypto, web3, and the future of global finance.
Gladstein pointed out that the way global news is shared has a huge impact on which issues people are invested in and pay attention to. “The media is designed in a way to focus on certain issues and not others, so our work takes that into account and what we try to do is break people’s bubbles” Gladstein told The Yield.
He added that there are a lot of issues worldwide that deserve our attention, and The Human Rights Foundation aims to balance which issues are highlighted to the public.
Invest in Crypto Today
Money, as Gladstein puts it, is an essential part of the human rights story, and digital assets like bitcoin have the potential to serve as a major component to advancing human rights. In countries where regimes abuse monetary privileges by freezing bank accounts or weaponizing money, bitcoin can serve as a shield for people to protect themselves. “Not only do we see bitcoin’s value from a micro point of view, for any individual in the world, you may want something that can’t be arbitrarily censored or frozen that gives it like a practical value that I think people haven’t quite grasped yet, that’s not priced in yet, but it will be over the coming decade,” Gladstein said.
He went on to say “from a macro sense, dollar instruments are going to lose a lot of purchasing power…whereas bitcoin is going to gain a lot of purchasing power. So I think it makes sense, both from a macro and micro view as a sound part of anyone’s portfolio, whether they be a family or a nation state.”
Gladstein is bullish on bitcoin for America and for open societies, but says it’s a real problem for dictators and that’s one of the reasons that he’s excited about it. “To me, bitcoin is freedom, it gives individuals power. It’s a more nuanced picture when it comes to governments. Strictly speaking it’s not good for governments, it takes power away from them…If you have a population that is increasingly using bitcoin as a savings instrument, as money, that takes a lot of power away from the government.”
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