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Comment by roywiggins | Hacker News Reader

There's no real problems with donating fiat to Ukraine, you can send money to them no problem.

https://u24.gov.ua/

As far as I can tell the reason they bought a bunch of stuff with crypto is because crypto fans gave them a bunch of crypto, not because they need to route around actual problems with the banking system.

Of course Ukraine would make noises about how much they like crypto, because anything that encourages crypto holders to donate is good for them. Even if they prefer fiat they probably won't complain- making crypto donors feel good about giving them money (because it is acting as an advertisement for crypto generally) is a good idea for Ukraine.

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Ironically, getting money into/out of Russia is probably a better use case for crypto[1]. But most crypto backers don't mention that since it makes them look like the villain.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/business/russia-sanctions...

Sure, there's no problem donating now 5 months into the war. But what about when the war just started? How would someone from the U.S. be able to donate money and be confident where it was going? It's not like the Ukrainian govt had a well-known paypal address.

How can you be confident where a BTC payment is going? Did they have a well-known BTC address? If it's a matter of a .gov.ua website posting a wallet address, that's not obviously better than a .gov.ua website posting an IBAN.

To be clear, the Ukraine government posted payment information by March 1st:

https://bank.gov.ua/en/news/all/natsionalniy-bank-vidkriv-sp...

No. This was not a problem. The ukrainian central bank and ministry of defense both had official announcements and publicly posted account numbers for swift/iban transfers to accept private international donations. These were setup and directly collecting funds within days. They raised millions of dollars, directly to operational accounts, in short order.

You are tilting at a windmill.

"Within days", when your country is being attacked now is a significant delay. No one is saying that the banking system failed Ukraine, but there are times when speed is essential and any delay is costly. Cryptos value is shown in such cases.

Ukraine's Twitter account tweeted a link to an official webpage with fiat donation instructions February 24, the day the invasion began:

https://twitter.com/Ukraine/status/1496817739419295751 ( https://archive.ph/Q1y7l )

It tweeted a BTC address on February 26, but it took a little while before people were sure they hadn't been hacked:

https://twitter.com/Ukraine/status/1497594592438497282

This is really missing the point. But OK, and how long does it take for an IBAN transaction to settle such that the money is spendable on the other end? Days?

https://www.yahoo.com/video/ukraine-government-using-crypto-...

> Chobanian says vendors are stepping up to accept crypto in exchange for supplies and crypto is proving to be more efficient than traditional payment methods.

> “It's really difficult to [send money] using traditional methods. First of all, it takes a lot of time. Secondly, it's a lot of bureaucracy and so on. Here, we are really fast. So we receive money and we spend it almost immediately,” Chobanian said.

https://www.yahoo.com/video/least-14m-26m-donated-crypto-215...

> “We're doing it really efficiently,” Chobanian added. “The majority of spending is actually done in crypto.”

Of course he would say that it's super-efficient and better than using existing banks, Chobanian runs a crypto exchange.

It's impossible to imagine a crypto exchange founder saying anything different.

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