Once you understand that your regime *is* the oppressive regime, you'd understand why this is necessary.
To really help ordinary people in oppressed countries, the first step is to implement policies such that they only affect those who should be affected.
If you do that, cryptocurrency benefits become moot: a Russian freelancer working overseas can legally TransferWise money to help her mom, but a Putin-connected oligarch can't wire money to help the regime.
For many reasons, it's difficult: e.g., how do you verify that your Russian user does not in fact work for Gazprom? Much safer to implement a total ban on anyone connecting from a Russian IP or using a Russian bank, explicitly sanctioned or not.
However, blanket financial anonymity at scale is not an acceptable workaround. Making it simpler for kleptocrats in charge to finance questionable activities and launder money obtained through thievery and violence, it introduces more problems than it solves, and in fact props up the regime.
There are plenty of nationalities which are banned from TransferWise:
https://wise.com/help/articles/2813542/why-cant-i-open-a-wis...
Russians may one day join that list.
I agree with everything you said, except this:
>>However, blanket financial anonymity at scale is not an acceptable workaround
Blanket financial anonymity is the only way to prevent circumstances like today's, where entire nationalities are locked out of the global financial system, and power becomes more concentrated over time.
Implementing this anonymity to allow regular guys help their families in Russia, who are now dealing with 4x price hike on basic goods, will help kleptocrats (the very guys causing that hike in the first place) finance their wars and further entrench themselves in power. Don't you see how this ultimately hurts those it ostensibly aims to help?
Regular guys will send home hundreds of USD, kleptocrats will launder billions.
Financial anonymity at scale exacerbates these asymmetries by helping those with the most money/power the most. Thinking otherwise is hoping they are clueless and don't employ teams of savvy people specifically to figure out various financing workarounds.
Those in the centers of power don't need to launder money. They write the laws, so their income is not illicit.
Oh yes they do. Read about all the ways dictators and their friends wash ill-gained riches in the West to buy real estate, enjoy lavish lifestyle, finance activities that undermine democracies and further their own agenda, etc. Sanctions exist for a reason.
You can't have anonymity without enabling crime and laundering. In a digital world where you need less to be physically present to profit from a crime, I want law enforcement to be able to seize criminal's funds.
If you think your government abuses that power try electing a different one, if you are in a democracy you can. If you want lawless anarchy I'm not with you, we had something like that in Russia in the 90s and it's not fun.
Those at the top of the political order within the centers global economic power have no need to engage something as crude as money laundering, or at least not the kind that depends on clandestine exchanges of briefcases filled with cash. Everything is reported and ostensibly legal.
>>You can't have anonymity without enabling crime and laundering.
You can very much combat crime without warrantless mass-surveillance of private financial transactions. Real crime leaves huge numbers of evidence trails that can be followed. Private electronic cash can also be utilized by law enforcement to incentivize informants to come forward anonymously.
Warrantless mass-surveillance enables tyranny. It enables the kind of systemic repression that can harm billions of people.