I've never heard of a bitcoin or Ethereum deterministic wallet being canceled because someone found out its owner is from Iran or Venezuela. That's a huge improvement over the crap that is the current financial system.
Also have you thought about the novel idea of old school policing to catch criminals instead of collaterally damaging the lives every single human in the world other than the 13% privileged who happen to be citizens of stable democracies?
I was more positive about crypto before the big NFT grift came along.
But even then, hardly anybody seemed to care about making crypto work as a currency. It was all about the speculation/gambling, get-rich-quick schemes, and memecoin pump+dumps. Nobody bought their groceries or paid their rent with crypto, it was just the currency of darknet drugs and cybercrime. And multi-million-dollar exchange hacks seemed to be almost weekly headlines.
Crypto wasn't going well, even before NFTs came along, and before the environmental opposition to mining ramped up.
That's our western perspective. Apparently NFTs and financialization are an ethereum and clones thing. Bitcoin has placed a ton of focus on cheap payments on the Lightning Network. Monero is focusing on privacy. Our media is hyper focused on tech bros getting rich on monkey pictures but out there people in Nigeria and Sudan are using Bitcoin and Tether as their life line. Ucranians did it too and that's the only option for Russian content creators who are mostly against Putin's regime. Yeah yeah scammy tether but for them its leagues better than the hyper inflated money they have available.
I guess its time for a reality check: Putin oligarchs are still filthy rich, the ruble has come back to pre-war levels while average Russian citizens who have been excluded from the rest of the world.
The ruble's course doesn't matter because it's close to unusable. The Russian economy is cut off from vital supplies, and will soon have all sorts of shortages of all sorts of high tech/quality things - vehicles, phones, computer parts, sensors for their precious resource extractions. China and India cannot fill all the gaps, there's too many of them.
As for the oligarchs, they're still rich, but much less so, and they've lost many precious toys ( yachts, villas, football clubs).
Yes, the average Russian citizen is excluded from the rest of the world, and will bear the brunt of the impact. As they should, because they're the ones who mostly sat idly and allowed all of this to happen. I have zero sympathy for the average Russian whose inaction made them unable to purchase a new phone or car. They won't starve to death, and they won't be bombes to pieces, which are the prospects facing Ukrainian citizens suffering from the invasion which brought all of this on.
> Yes, the average Russian citizen is excluded from the rest of the world, and will bear the brunt of the impact. As they should, because they're the ones who mostly sat idly and allowed all of this to happen. I have zero sympathy for the average Russian whose inaction made them unable to purchase a new phone or car.
What do you expect the average Russia to have done exactly? I’m curious what you would have done in their position.
IMO we should do the opposite. We should bombard those countries with our shit. Our cheap services, our shows, our food, our way of life. Hire their engineers. Give them tech like Uber and crupto to create a nightmare for their control freak governors. Erode and drain their funds. Capture the hearts of their young. But instead Russians are listening to their government say "See I told you they hate us".
That's what has been done until now. Germany even had an explicit policy of economic interdependence to make a war unimaginable. You can see how well that worked, right?
And they don't have it anymore. Those people who _actually_ protested and got beaten and arrested by _real_ tyrannical governments are being told by their government "see I told you they hate us" while also being criticized for "not doing enough" by people like you who probably never experienced what is to live outside of the privileged 13% humans who are born in stable democracies.
Not vote for Putin and his party for decades? Go out in the streets when opposition leaders or dissidents were assasinated in broad daylight? Something? Anything? Because of them allowing Putin to get where he is, now innocent Ukrainians are suffering terrible atrocities. I know which population is more guilty and which deserving of compassion.
Something like the Belarusians who went to the streets to protest against a fraudulent election and got violently crushed by their police state? The same "evil complacent" Belarusians that are also being sanctioned now?
When was the last time you've left the safety of your home to put your life on risk to protest against your government?
Of course now is too late, the police state is well too developed for such protests to not turn out very bloody. And yes, Belarus and Kazakhstan crushing their protestors is also partly the fault of the complacent apathetic Russians. Without Putin's support both would have probably succeeded.
> When was the last time you've left the safety of your home to put your life on risk to protest against your government?
Many times. Admittedly the risk of arbitrary incarceration or death has always been low in my case, but it's because the places I've lived in didn't allow things to get as bad as Lukashenko and Putin's regimes are.
Lukashenko has been belarus president since the fall of the USSR. Do you really think they ever had a chance at a fair election? What can be said of Russia then? Didn't they just used KGB strategies to poison the strongest opositor Navalny?
> because the places I've lived in didn't allow things to get as bad as Lukashenko and Putin's regimes are
Was it you or people who fought and died decades or centuries ago to achieve the presumably stable democracy you enjoy today? Please do not misunderstand I'm not saying your activism or causes are not important but trying to tell you that things are really tough outside the comfort zone of the first world.
I'm sorry but is just seems cruel, unfair and childish to expect that by starving people living in dictatorships they will just topple their corrupt government.
> Yes, the average Russian citizen is excluded from the rest of the world, and will bear the brunt of the impact. As they should, because they're the ones who mostly sat idly and allowed all of this to happen.
Speaking for a point of privilege right here aren't we?
Any state with sufficient laws can enforce exchanges, businesses, etc. to blacklist wallets which have been identified as foreign owned - if there are sanctions / embargos against said country/countries.
Of course, there are ways to obfuscate the money trail, but if they start handing out hard prison time and fines, that alone will probably deter most.
So while you still have a "bank", so to speak, you're still limited to whom you can do business with.
