Iran makes first import order using cryptocurrency – report
reuters.com
reuters.com
it's justification of might and power. summed up in "might makes right".
there's also something of this in the reasoning behind the phrase "history is written by the winners".
this is only an instance of power being wielded by the powerful.
At most they have some (among many other) assets in america.
The people demanding ahistorical special privileges are so-called "intellectual property holders". I have zero sympathies for the plight of these parasitical rent collectors. They certainly don't hold any special sympathies for the American people.
Initially they were a response to the Iran Hostage Crisis. Since the Clinton administration, the reasons have been Iran's nuclear program and support for groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas.
> It’s apparently ok for the US to have as many nukes as it sees fit, but not ok for others to have the same.
This isn't just a US goal. 190 countries have agreed to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The ferrocity of american hatred also seems to increase, the more cultural similarity there is. Russia with its redneck culture and iranians with there crazy almost protestant messianic streak, are to much of a mirror to not bark and bite at.
Crypto is to find out about the ten dolar wench as the ultimate key..
https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/npt/
Iran is also being sanctioned as a state sponsor of terrorism.
There is no question that Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism. They have literally given weapons and funding to terrorist groups which killed Americans and our allies. If Iran (or other countries) want to also designate the USA as a state sponsor of terrorism under their national laws and impose economic sanctions on us then they're free to do so.
Even less so on issues like this, where the two privileged parties have the exact same policy despite it not benefiting the American people.
[1] - https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/10/isiss-new-plans-to-get-...
I may be an antirevolutionary to the bone, but seeing some comments like these really make me reevaluate my priors.
How much oil could be saved if the US decided to abandon this failed experiment called "American Suburbia" and started to plan for a urban environment that is not car-dependent?
No one is stating that this might not be an issue.
People are totally able to complain about multiple things.
But let me tell you: it's much easier to bash crypto as it's new and fresh and very scammy and bad. It's a good thing that we stand up and say no to it for now to stop the already giant waste it creates.
We don't need an Additional co2 creater with zero benefit.
Ethereum will switch to PoS next month, and there will be hundreds of thousands of nodes around the world, in aggregate they will run on a fraction of the energy consumed by the millions of video game consoles while idling.
By all means, complain about Proof of Work all you want but get off the high horse. Those "bashing crypto" and talk about "the waste it creates" are usually so covered in privilege they can't even be bothered to actually go to put the numbers in perspective.
I'm aware of it.
Eth hasn't switched yet, the GPU problem was real and the terrawatts 'crypto' consumes is also real.
Of course I simply slightly when I don't 'bother' to name not 10 or 50 different pow blockchains but why not?
The general problem exists. It hurts us all much more than it helps and crypto threads are the correct place to comment on this issue.
And yes the current drought might not be created by crypto alone but that doesn't make it any better.
Then it is not ignorance, which leaves you the alternative: dishonesty.
What really pisses me off is the perma-comment of "we don't need crypto", "there are no use cases", "it is only for scams", etc. Go ask people in Argentina how they are managing to keep some sense of financial normalcy, lots of them will tell you "crypto".
Let's ignore how most people in El Salvador are not able to use their crypto because they don't understand it. Let's ignore that most of them not even understand lightning.
Let's ignore that the evil actors can miss use crypto as well which weakens sanctions.
Completely ignore all other obvious issues with crypto which have been brought up by me and others without any answer to them as long as there is the one person in <add country> who apparently is able to exchange their money with crypto.
Let's also ignore that plenty of people have been exchanging their unsta Le currency with other money before crypto like us or euro.
Who ever was able to exchange their money to crypto would have been able to do so without crypto...
Let's also ignore that 99,9999 % of people will be hurt by all the co2 before they have ever any benefit of crypto.
And as my final argument: crypto means that everyone who started to do it early gets more value in out of crypto as everyone after them. No one in their sane mind will ever switch their money over into crypto and loosing out by making the earlier adopters even richer.
Cryptobros go f yourself...
You keep hitting the wrong drum. Again, get off the high horse. Come back when you understand that I am on your side in regards to Bitcoin, even though your arguments are completely misguided.
Otherwise if a copy of a music album makes it's way to a street vendor in Iran is Pink in trouble?
The your democratically elected official can only control waste of electricity in the region they live.
Your comment is so unrealistic and glosses over so many details I wonder if you're the type of politician that gets elected by saying you'll ban the Internet or force porn sites to require identification, and then have to face reality that it's a little more complicated than that.
I wouldn't even know where to start explaining that what you're asking for is a very hard problem even for a very closed political and economical system like China.
I think you're saying this would be a big hassle, maybe for miners. Can you explain that more?
- One can create an unlimited number of addresses for a single wallet. The size of your banned_addresses.csv updated every morning is for all intents and purposes unbounded.
- The hard problem is proving if the beneficiary is an Iranian national. It's already difficult to do in the regular economy with KYC regulations and everything is government controlled (shell companies, etc.), doing so with Bitcoin is even harder. I don't mean hard as in "the US govt has the resources to do it", I mean hard as it's pretty much impossible.
Please don't take this the wrong way, but learn a little bit about Bitcoin, if you really want to do something about the problems it poses. It's overall pretty simple. Otherwise you're just another person that has strong opinions about something they don't know anything about.
No authorithy, be it US or any other country, should have such a power.
It's good to see this patriotic ideology finally coming to an end.
If your problem is with a superpower having superior force projection on the world stage, crypto doesn’t solve for that. The drone strikes and assassinations would still happen.
The unstable math of the way that the U.S. democracy works means that we are going to have increasingly unstable (and therefore untrustworthy) policy responses to many world events in the next decades. Iran, and every other country on earth, now knows not to trust us, and its future actions will have that baked in. We've lost the moral high ground, and that will hurt us more than help us.
Interesting
So this is a non-story so far (even with the backstory of Iran doing bitcoin mining - there are pros and cons of using it, though of course it is the most likely answer)
To pay with crypto you first need to acquire it (multiple ways to do it - including not so legal ones, though I'm not saying which way might have been)
So there is that.
But the story ultimately looks entirely based on a tweet [1] from an official that Google translates as:
> This week, the first official import order registration with #currency_currency worth 10 million dollars was successfully completed. By the end of September, the use of cryptocurrencies and smart contracts will be widespread in foreign trade with target countries.
So I agree that the story is pretty thin.
[1] https://twitter.com/peymanpak_ir/status/1556927239907835904
FWIW, I wouldn't put it past the US govt to ban cryptocurrencies. It just would be extremely hypocritical. Something the US is pretty familiar with.
[1]: https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/07/15/vladimir-putin-ba...
[2]: https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/09/24/china-s-makes-all-c...
And since there is no physical product or evidence it's actually much easier, my friend from Amsterdam will have a lot of trouble bringing me weed, he will have zero difficulty sending $100 worth of BTC to an address I give him.
The idea that you can just ban things and they will go away should have died with alcohol prohibitions. I guess at least no one will get killed in a war on crypto...
And even if it doesn't, your friendly local drug dealer, who may already be trading crypto to purchase product, will presumably offer exchange services. No one needs an exchange they can just charge a spread between people wanting to buy and those wanting to sell. That's how money change already works after all...
And you're right about Monero!
US has tried the ban hammer both for alcohol and then for drugs, how has that worked out for them?
That would just create a massive underground black market, this time even more pernicious because it's international, with state-level actors.
Some say it's by design, but I think it's just because of how our global economy and the Internet itself works. It's fine to hate Bitcoin, but it's got this viral quality to it that it is not to be underestimated in the macroeconomic and political scale.
Surely something, but probably not $23k a coin and forget $60k a few months ago.
If Iran can use Bitcoin to transfer wealth across borders, and can't convert it to (i.e. buy) USD, but can convert it to (i.e buy) EUR, the next decade in geopolitics will be very interesting.
That affects every organization in the world that wants to do business in the united states, including shell corps, which is basically every major financial player that matters.
The next decade will be interesting but not for this.
The current price of btc is supported by large institutions. These disappear, so does the price.
Does the American regulatory hammer have worldwide jurisdiction? US might convince the EU to follow suit, but what if China says "sure Iran, we'll gladly buy your BTC and sell you RMB", what then? These worldwide regulatory hammers that pretty much everybody (not just in the Western world) respects are called embargoes. Good luck embargoing China.
Unless by regulatory hammer you mean the US military, then yes, there's a chance they could do something, but it won't be pretty for anybody. If it's just lawyers arguing, I'm telling you it's easier not to ban Bitcoin but embracing it (and extinguishing it) without weakening the US position in the world stage.
> The current price of btc is supported by large institutions.
This is just plain wrong.
It has worldwide jurisdiction for any company that wants to do business with the US.
China already actively trades with Iran so this would be largely irrelevant. And yet the CFO of Huawei was still arrested a few years back for violating sanctions.
> This is just plain wrong.
You're right, there's also crime and sanctions avoiders
But kill the on ramps to clean western currency and this all falls apart.
There's still an economy. You can use decentralized exchanges like Bisq, Robosats, etc to buy and sell Bitcoin, even if they banned every centralized exchange. You can also directly transact Bitcoin for goods and services in the underground market.
Nope. They either don't care or actually like it.
Also, "banning" things in America is close to impossible due to the populace intense distrust of the government. You can't even ban AR-15s, imagine thinking its possible to ban a piece of software running on a raspberry-pi.
Things are banned all the time in the US, including pieces of software. See Tornado Cash for an extremely recent example.
You can then use a lawful nft sale on opensea to your “dirty” wallet to make the money look legitimate. With your defense being you merely sold the nft. You don’t know who the buyer is.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_i...
So perhaps it is time to accept and admit that some cryptocurrencies are here to stay and reject the delusion that is repeated here that all of them are going to be totally banned 100% entirely.