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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

And the MOEX is still closed (for more than a week now). For all the downsides of crypto, you can see the upside of decentralization here.

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How on earth does cryptocurrency help? If I owned RUB, they've devalued by the same amount vs every other currency, including bitcoin.

If your argument is 'you should have bought bitcoin before', then I could have bought any other currency before, including all the useful ones as well. There's no blockchain magic to the rescue here.

Crypto wouldn’t stop economic warfare.

If crypto really was the norm sanctions would look like making transactions with sanctioned entities a crime (not that it already isn’t) and local violators would get targeted and charged a whole lot more.

The “decentralized” part of crypto works for black markets and money laundering on scales which get ignored, but you’d better bet that if the west wanted to sanction a country they would succeed even if crypto was a significant portion of the economy.

Is crypto decentralized if all practical exchanges for ordinary users are highly centralized?

That was my question too... to get practical use out of it in terms of transferring value, 9/10 it goes back to fiat - and that's going to be centralized in a majority of the cases.

I can buy some hosting services with crypto, but pretty much everything else I'm involved with requires USD or equivalent.

I also like to make my purchases at a whim - crypto jumping up/down with the moment means one payment today could've been two tomorrow. I try to spend it well but this is unnecessary calculus

If crypto were ubiquitous as a currency (assuming that's technically possible in terms of scale in a way that the current implementations seem not to be) sanctions in the first place would have been impossible. So depending on your viewpoint that's a major downside to the idea of a decentralized currency.

This isn't at all true. When companies aren't permitted to do business with Russia, currencies and forms of payment don't matter. If I own a company in the US, I'm not going to ship any products to Russia, regardless of whether I'm paid in roubles, crypto or dollars.

The sanctions regarding exports to Russia have to this point been relatively limited. The financial sanctions are what are doing the work right now.

Russia's principle problem is that its own currency is becoming worthless and external currencies are becoming inaccessible. This is a problem for the Russian state as well as individuals residing in it. If a ubiquitous and stable worldwide cryptocurrency were to exist, this would no longer be so much of a problem for Russia, to the detriment of all other sane countries.

Let's not kid ourselves, if there was such cryptocurrency the sanctions would have been drafted differently and the end result would have been the same.

The sanctions are being created for the world in which we live now. If you want to consider a theoretical world in which crypto is the main form of currency, you would also need to consider what kind of sanctions governments would impose in that world, not just assume that they'd do the exact same thing they're doing in the current circumstances.

What if you sell services, not products?

Take the payment in crypto, don’t ask where the customer is located.

You're looking purely at the theoretical possibilities of crypto while ignoring the reality of a situation in which major sanctions are enacted. Who are the people who are going to be selling their services to Russia in a situation like this? You can already see companies that haven't chosen to suspend business in Russia (even though there are no sanctions forcing them to stop) suffering major reputational damage.

Just because you could theoretically get around sanctions doesn't mean that any serious number of people would do it. It also doesn't mean that you can't get caught - it's not like you can untraceably provide services, so there's very much a nonzero chance you get caught.

To whom? Lawless despots?

Everyone.

Call me old-fashioned but I could argue that "everyone" benefits from a world where we can still economically isolate genocidal regimes.

We do away with this power at our peril.

I 100% agree, now who you want to be the judge of bad/good wars? The UN w/ veto power for big countries? Maybe the international war crime court where "the US government has said that it will not cooperate with the ICC and has threatened retaliatory steps against ICC staff and member countries should the court investigate US or allied country citizens" [0]?

Don't get me wrong, as an American citizen, I enjoy my privilege very much. But, if I didn't have this privilege, I would fight as hell for amoral money or at least a fair international court.

0. https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/09/02/qa-international-crimina...

With Russia debating shutting themselves out of the global internet, I doubt Bitcoin could be a competent solution to this problem.

I wonder whether MOEX will reopen at this point.

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