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Comment by shock-value | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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