I’m not pro crypto or pro Russia, but the fact that it’s so easy to lose ones freedom to transact[0] (regardless of the specific merits here) is troubling.
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/punk6529/status/14944446246304030...
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/punk6529/status/14944446246304030...
But we are testing modern finance by weaponising the financial system. The most problematic move I think has been freezing the central bank's reserve. It might achieve the short term gain of hurting Russia, but what about the long term impact on the trust in holding foreign currencies?
Simples
They will fight to protect that status. And over the medium to long term, they will reorient their economies so that they are not dependent on autocratic countries.
Autocracy will lose long term.
But wait you say, those are bad people, and I’m a good person, I have nothing to fear! Good luck with that.
Edit: It didn’t take long for a good person with nothing to fear to assure us of his status.
I have never had any expectation that when I am actively committing a crime, I can expect authorities to wait for the courts to decide if I should face any immediate sanctions or controls to stop my behavior.
What would you rather have happen? Rubber bullets and tear gas? Or are you actually suggesting that it is okay to hold the public hostage until you get what you want?
Ghandi and MLK have already given us the answer to that question. It's fine to peacefully protest until you achieve your objectives. Yes, people will try to malign you (saying that you're 'holding the public hostage') and insinuate things about you, but ignore them. It's okay.
It's okay.
And before you say anything about BLM, recall than many thousands of people were arrested last year during those protests, and there were plenty of rubber bullets, tear gas, and beatings.
I'm always amazed at the extent people will go to absolve their own tribe from responsibility while accusing the other side of doing the same thing.
Personally I abhorred the violence in downtown Portland last year and I'm glad they finally stopped. I think the police need to dial it back a little in many cases, but I want them to be able to put a lid on the ability of protesters to destroy the lives of innocent people. And I think January 6 was an insurrection, but of course it was. I find all of y'all kinda annoying :).
>their own tribe
This is the problem in your thinking. These 'tribes' you worry about aren't real. It's an artifact of twitter, of terrible reportage, of lazy journalism and muck-slinging that puts lots of different typs of people in one box because that makes it easy to pick out the craziest of them and and say that they're all like that.
By and large the protesters were/are just normal people who want to be able to get on with their lives and accept the risks they're comfortable with. They spend all their life in their trucks, alone. They interact with maybe 5 people per week, if that, but they're forced to get a vaccination whereas grocery clerks who interact with 5 people every 15 minutes aren't. Most of them already have the vaccination but it's the principle, dammit. And they're sick of journalists and twitterati calling them - and everyone else, for that matter - nazis because a few lunatics showed up to the protest with nazi flags and got kicked out. It's boring that the media keep falling for this shtick. Every single time. You have a group of normalish people with normalish goals and all of a sudden some crazy fucker pops up with a nazi flag. You eject them but then all you hear on the news for the next month is 'nazi truckers...' It's just shit reportage. Utterly shit lazy yellow journalism.
When you finally realise that people just want to be left alone and not slandered and tarred with labels they don't deserve so much of this pointless infighting will go away. But then the media would have nothing to report on.
At least this time the provocateur remembered to iron out the creases on the flag he bought brand new for the occasion. It happens so frequently and so reliably that one can’t help but wonder if the media malfeasance is more than mere laziness. Honest errors are not always biased in one direction.
Of course it is. The modern media is absurdly woke and out of touch with reality and pretty much without principle either.
The trucker convoy was a perfect example of a modern working-class struggle and the media lined up to portray them as anything but.
I remember literally reading in some op-ed words along the lines of 'the truckers are not the working class, they are the modern bourgeoise; they do not work with their hands but merely direct from padded comfort the toil of their mechanical slave.'
It would be funny if it didn't actually affect things.
Due process was still followed even if we don't necessarily like what it was.
It wasn't exactly violent either. Better hope you never have to actually use violence against a corrupt system
There are very few gray areas about what they are doing in Ukraine, so everyone is firing with everything they've got. Weapons of Mass Financial Destruction someone called them.
Usually sanctions are a bit of this and bit of that, just enough to put pressure on the politicians. Now we have companies left and right refusing to do business with Russia, all their foreign money is frozen and billionaires are getting their yachts taken from them. They can't even sell their oil anywhere, not even at a discount. (Although it seems Shell bought some, let's see how the fallout from that decision turns out).
The same would be true of China invading Taiwan.
None other than the hypocrisy of the US and the global standards it has set will be the cause of a global conflict. They just have to keep their forces in check, while an opponent does what they have been doing for decades on a non NATO country. Objectively speaking, THAT is the best decision for world peace. And it's all on the US alone. They can do it, and no one is forcing them otherwise.
When you typed this out, did it not occur to you that this feels this way to you due to a self-imposed bubble?
But now we have actual footage of Russia arresting people protesting against the war, just shooting artillery salvos at hospitals and schools. Oh, and FIRING AT A FUCKING NUCLEAR POWER PLANT. You don't get much more cartoon bad guy than that.
It's a shame that the regular Russian people have to suffer, but the only way to get tiny-P off the throne is to turn the country against him and make stuff so unbearable that even the official news can't explain it away with "russophobia".
I think you can assume that it does occur to most of us that we are all in a bubble to some extent, and that it’s important to be aware of that when forming your own views. It’s also totally possible for someone to come to a firm conclusion about the morality of a particular act without it having to be the effect of a bubble.
It’s easy to picture someone reasonably aware of the context of the invasion, including the restriction of water supplies to Crimea, NATO expansion, the background to the separatist conflicts, Euromaidan, the Azov Battalion, and all the other bits and pieces that we’ve all seen countless articles about over the past two weeks. It doesn’t seem invalid for that person to have a reasonably well-informed view that the actions of Russia are Very Extremely Bad Indeed and that there are “few gray areas”, does it?
How is it easy? Does your country's dictator regularly invade neighbors without so much as pretext and targets civilians?
The key is that they tend to not invade European neighbours. So, yes, if you upset Europe, and all your transactions rely on European cooperation, you may no longer be able to transact.
In fact, if you upset Europe enough, and are not a nuclear state, you might even get invaded as a result. Your concerns about international financial transactions will be a bit academic at that point.
If anything, this episode should make you more confident about transactions just working. The point at which they stop working is 'We've done everything we could against you, short of declaring war.'
Now it's pretty clear how crypto can have a use case (as some of us already knew and were hammering on about it for a long time).
So can we set a new baseline here, and agree that crypto has a use-case? Or are you anti-crypto people still as short sighted as before?
I think we made some progress here on HN, and some of the "anti-crypto" people are now moving into "not pro crypto" space.
Evading sanctions is just another type of illegal trade.
See, every use-case can be easily taken down.
If I was in Russia, I would be very glad to own some crypto right now. But hey, you do you.
I am absolutely sure that Transferwise is still available for Russians to use, so the freedom to transact isn't really lost. 'Cryptocurrencies' should not be used at all.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/payments-company-wise-sus...
You do realise that Transferwise isn’t the only money transfer service, there only given as an example.
The fact that the article states that there was a limit shows this ‘ban’ is only a temporary measure by Wise.
As I said you can still use other regulated alternatives.
What aspect of 'sanctions' do you not understand?
Edit: Oh, I read your other contributions in this thread and see you're just trolling. My mistake.
A source from you would be great rather than dismissing my claim with ‘sanctions’.
You need to elaborate.
Much like you sourced your claim that transferwise worked? No thanks, I'll save my time.
Why not? Are you allergic to them or something? Why can't someone transfer money using crypto if it benefits them to do so?
Try sending me money using a coin that is regulated, not volatile and rife with scams and does not contribute to burning up the planet.
You mean stablecoins like USDC and Tether? I am assuming you sure you are very much informed on those coins are not scams and are regulated right?
It’s troubling, but hardly without precedent. Imagine if they had social media in the 30s-40s.
I have thought about this, and given the amount of pro-Fascist sentiment in Western Europe, WWII probably wouldn't have happened. Germany would probably have gotten away with taking Austria, Czechoslovakia, possibly the lands forfeited to France after WWI and at least part of Poland.
The world would look VERY different to today. Assuming Japan stuck to their neck of the woods, the USA probably would never have gotten to be a super power (given it was WWII that really catapulted them into that category). The UK may still have reasonable parts of the empire. The super powers would probably be Germany, USSR and a lesser extent, UK, Japan.
This is the stuff of alt-historical fiction.
EDIT: apologies for straying off topic but I couldn't resist.
Wouldn't it be just easier to fix our institutions so that we can trust and rely on them?
The crypto economy for example is full of sharks. It's a bigger, insider, scammer dog eats smaller, outsider, bagholder dog world and there is no fixing it. It's a zero sum game. It's unsustainable. It's inhumane. It's too simple to hold up any practical economy at scale.
Imagine there's one big bully in a schoolyard playground, alongside the one kid who is singled out. All the other kids (freely) choose to follow the bullies' lead and, at the very best, join in by ostracizing the victim. Who is in the wrong in that scenario?
The best thing Russian people can do is render Putin the king of an empty kingdom, and that was always the solution. Sure, there are hundreds of thousands, to millions and tens of millions of people (depending on where the poverty line is in Russia) for who that isn't an option. Equally so, those people wouldn't have been able to lift Putin's empire into what it is today. There would rather be no expertise for nukes, nobody to architect oil pipelines, and a terribly demoralized and disloyal army. Russia is has aspects of a developed country because of the fantastic people that live there.
Stop paying taxes to dictators, narcissists, and megalomaniacs.
We should widely open borders to Russian refugees and defectors. Patriotism is the love of a country, not a dictator.