When I started helping with lighting Bitcoin I never though how quickly Bitcoin would catch on in Canada. Go Fraud me had raised over 10 million before to much political press came down. They had already dispersed 1 million dollars, but then the TD bank froze that money on their side.
What are freedom loving Canadians to do where they can't send money to each other? Well, up steps the website was a little bit more developed than https://geyser.fund/ and it has already implemented Bitcoin lightning payments. The reason why lightning was so important was because on-chain transactions where costing 10 sats / vByte (approx 1 dollar per transaction) for the last 2 weeks. The other important factor is lightning allows for more anonymous donations. Cheap, anonymous donations allowed over 5000 people to donate over 1 million with no fear of bank or government seizure. Like their website says:
"The Canadian Bitcoin community would like to have a second financial
access point for #FreedomConvoy2022. Legacy financial infrastructure can
sometimes be politicized and clamped down upon, whereas Bitcoin is a
truly censorship resistant method of communicating value. Don't allow
your voices to be silenced, and don't allow your financial sovereignty
to be trampled upon. Love, unity and freedom - let's raise some hard money for hard workers!"
To have a sense of how amazing this is you need to realize how new lighting transactions are. Right now there are only 3500 Bitcoins on 35,000 nodes (20,000 active) so these Bitcoin banks are only risking 200 million whereas the Bitcoin network is worth over 1 trillion.
