When GoFundMe placed its $10-million fundraiser for the convoy protest under review last Wednesday, HonkHonk Hodl was just getting started.

The Bitcoin-based fundraiser launched Feb. 1, the day before the GoFundMe review began. Within 24 hours, its Twitter account was cheering the fact it had raised one-quarter of a bitcoin in support of the convoy, the equivalent of just over $12,000.

“Silly us, we may have been overly bearish on the generosity of Bitcoiners,” the tweet reads. “Perhaps we can set our sights a bit higher.”

As it turned out, they certainly could. On Friday, GoFundMe declared it would issue refunds for or redistribute to charities all but $1 million of the total raised in support of the convoy, after determining “that the previously peaceful demonstration has become an occupation, with police reports of violence and other unlawful activity.” (It later said it would automatically refund all contributions.) In response, donations to HonkHonk Hodl and other Bitcoin fundraisers exploded, with HonkHonk Hodl raising the equivalent of over $500,000, and a campaign underway to more than double that.

Bitcoin is often criticized as a “solution in search of a problem,” but the success of HonkHonk Hodl demonstrates the technology has a genuine use case—just not one everyone’s happy about. Its censorship-resistant properties constrain governments and law enforcement from controlling economic activity of all kinds, from terrorist financing to dissident movements in authoritarian regimes.

HonkHonk Hodl doesn’t have the reach, name recognition or frictionless payment experience of GoFundMe, but it has one very important advantage. Donations go directly to the organizer’s Bitcoin wallet, which means they can’t be stopped, reversed or seized. The fundraiser uses a third-party platform called Tallycoin for its crowdfunding webpage, but shutting that down would only make it a bit more difficult to advertise the fundraising effort.

In an interview with The Logic, Greg Foss, one of the organizers of HonkHonk Hodl, said the shutdown of the GoFundMe convoy fundraiser demonstrates the power of Bitcoin. Transactions take place thanks to the cooperation of a network of computers around the world, which means there’s no middleman on whom to apply political pressure, or who can be ordered to relinquish the funds or summoned to the House of Commons.

“It’s showing the power of the Lightning Network and the Bitcoin network. It’s showing the weakness of a centralized platform like GoFundMe,” Foss said. He said he expects many convoy supporters will become Bitcoin converts—“orangepilled”—now that they’ve experienced its use case firsthand.

Whether Bitcoin’s censorship resistance is a net positive or a net negative for society is up for debate.

People who argue it’s a net negative cite the rise of ransomware attacks, in which cybercriminals seize control of an organization’s computer equipment and demand payment in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin has also been a boon to white supremacists—the Southern Poverty Law Center estimates extreme far-right figures have generated tens of millions of dollars from cryptocurrency.

Oren Segal, vice-president of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League in New York, said most extremists aren’t using cryptocurrency, but those who do find the technology and its surrounding anti-establishment culture useful. “Part of the subculture of extremists is finding ways to get around rules and regulations and to suggest that the old ways are tyrannical,” he said.

Those who argue Bitcoin’s censorship resistance is a net positive, on the other hand, cite as examples the jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, Afghans sidestepping the Taliban to receive emergency aid and protests against police brutality in Nigeria to show people and movements that Bitcoin has helped.

The list of people who would put the convoy protest in the “net negative” category is long—Ottawa residents have been subject to inconvenience, harassment and symbols of hate, and the stated goal of the movement is to overthrow the elected government and invalidate public health restrictions. But some see GoFundMe’s ability to unilaterally cancel a multimillion-dollar fundraiser—first freezing the money then returning it to donors—as a troubling move regardless: “I don’t agree with this ‘freedom convoy’ crap. BUT I believe even more strongly that NO ONE should be able to freeze your funds because they disagree with your movement. No matter how annoying and stupid it is,” wrote a commenter on the Bitcoin subreddit.

Bitcoin’s censorship resistance has its limits, however. Jonathan Ip, a lawyer who advises blockchain and cryptocurrency companies, said the organizers of HonkHonk Hodl and other Bitcoin fundraisers in support of the convoy may run into problems when they try to use the bitcoins they’ve raised to actually buy things. “I think the main problem that they’re going to have is trying to convert it into fiat,” he said.

Few Canadian businesses accept Bitcoin, which means the fundraisers will need to convert it into dollars if they want to use it to fund the convoy’s immediate material needs. And doing that usually involves going through a cryptocurrency-trading platform—in other words, a third-party business, which can be subject to the same pressures from the public, elected officials and law enforcement that GoFundMe ran into.

Ip also said the people in control of the Bitcoin wallets collecting funds for the convoy could be sued by businesses experiencing loss of revenue as a result of the protest. “I think that would be interesting to see,” he said.

At a press conference Monday, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino noted that it’s against the law to undermine public safety or national security, as is foreign political interference. He said intelligence agencies track foreign funding contributions. “There would be appropriate sanctions for that if proven in a court of law,” Mendicino said.

Foss, for his part, said he sees supporting the convoy via HonkHonk Hodl as a way to support freedom of expression, and freedom of choice when it comes to vaccines and other COVID-19 restrictions, as well as a way to oppose Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s fiscal stewardship. He said none of the four people who share control of the Bitcoin wallet holding the funds are organizers of the demonstration, although he said they’ve been in touch with them.

HonkHonk Hodl also hasn’t decided yet what to do with the bitcoins, Foss said. He said the group has considered donating money to the Shepherds of Good Hope soup kitchen, if it could substantiate reports that protesters harassed staff and assaulted a client.

Foss also said the group is considering doing something that would be true to the Bitcoiner spirit and the fundraiser’s name, which references a now-intentional misspelling of “hold” from a 2013 forum. He said they might not cash the bitcoins out into dollars at all, which would avoid a number of potential legal and practical pitfalls.

“We would love to hold this money as an endowment for the truckers,” Foss said. “We think that Bitcoin could reach multiple, multiple levels of its current value.”