this will do more than McDonald's accepting bitcoin because this is the first time like a Western Democratic state is seizing people's funds like in an incredibly unfair, unnecessary way, which is just going to have more people say, you know what, maybe I should keep some of my net worth out of the government's purview if they're going to seize it anyway. And then now people are going to start looking into the coins that allow people to.View on YouTube
Evidence shows some short‑term behavioral change but does not let us cleanly confirm or falsify Jason’s stronger, long‑run causal claim.
Key points:
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What happened in Canada: During the 2022 Freedom Convoy, the Trudeau government invoked the Emergencies Act and froze dozens of bank accounts tied to organizers and supporters. Some donors and organizers responded by turning to Bitcoin explicitly to avoid government control of funds. (en.wikipedia.org) This clearly demonstrates the possibility Jason described (using crypto to stay outside direct state control) but on a very localized, episodic scale.
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Canadian adoption data do not show a post‑event surge: Bank of Canada surveys show Bitcoin ownership among Canadians rose to about 13% in 2021, before the convoy, then fell to ~10% in 2022 and stayed around 10% in 2023, with ownership of other cryptoassets also declining over that period. (bankofcanada.ca) The Bank attributes these changes mainly to price declines and tighter regulation, and finds that most owners see Bitcoin primarily as an investment, not as a censorship‑resistant store of wealth. (bankofcanada.ca) So in Canada itself—where the triggering event occurred—there is no measured, sustained bump in ownership that can be tied to the Emergencies Act.
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Global privacy‑coin/"self‑custody" trend has many drivers: By 2024–2025, privacy‑focused assets such as Monero and Zcash and broader anti‑surveillance narratives did become more prominent, with privacy coins accounting for a growing share of crypto transactions and user portfolios. (coinlaw.io) However, major analyses link this primarily to global regulatory and surveillance developments—like sanctions and prosecutions around Tornado Cash and expanding state on‑chain monitoring—rather than to the Canadian convoy episode specifically. (chaincatcher.com) Existing data do not separate out “I hold this to keep assets outside government control because of what happened in Canada” as a distinct, measurable motive.
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The comparison to McDonald’s accepting Bitcoin is inherently hypothetical: McDonald’s has not rolled out Bitcoin payments as a standard, global option. Only small, localized pilots (e.g., in Lugano, Switzerland, and within El Salvador’s broader Bitcoin experiment) have ever existed; corporate‑wide adoption has never happened. (blog.mexc.com) That means we cannot empirically compare the impact of the Canada incident to the effect of a true, global “McDonald’s accepts Bitcoin” moment—Jason’s benchmark remains counterfactual.
Because:
- We do see the specific behavior Jason described (using Bitcoin to escape financial censorship) during the convoy itself, but
- National data in Canada contradict the idea of a sustained, measurable adoption surge afterward, and
- Global data do not isolate the Canadian event as a major causal driver of people holding part of their net worth in crypto for anti‑government reasons, and
- His comparison point (full McDonald’s adoption) never occurred in a way we can measure,
there isn’t enough clean, quantitative evidence to say his prediction was clearly right or clearly wrong. The overall assessment is therefore ambiguous rather than definitively correct or incorrect.