A Putin Aide Is Eyeing Cryptocurrencies to Beat Sanctions, Report Says
I&#x27;m surprised that it is taking as long as it is taking for this to occur.  It&#x27;s also one of the reasons why it is going to be virtually impossible to stop.<p>Over the past year there has been a corporate hijack attempt of the bitcoin consensus rules.  The thing that is painfully obvious is how totally disorganised and incompetent the attack was.  Anyone who understands how the technology works has listened to armies of get-rich-quick junkies explaining how their new fandangled blockchainz are gonna takeova da cryptoz.  In reality, bitcoin is now stronger than it was six months ago, as its nodes are even more decentralized, and it is apparent to anyone who cares to look, that the threat of a PoW change that started being bandied about in bitcoin, actually made the corporate types slam on the brakes before they got crushed.<p>But when state actors get involved, that is going to be an entirely different story.  I expect that at some point over the next couple of years, governments (like the US) will black-list bitcoin addresses, which undermines the ability to shift funds.  They&#x27;ll go to coinbase, or every other exchange in western nations, and tell them which addresses they want payments halted in.  Which is why technologies such as lightning  have been developed, to further decentralize value transfers in the system.  It will even allow for the routing of payments through a multiple of different blockchains if a route can&#x27;t be found between participants.<p>When any state actor decides that they want to start utilizing this value transfer system for things like oil, it will be trivially easy to circumvent sanctions.  The greater the value of the market capitalization, the easier it will be to do this.  I make no comment on whether it is good or bad.  In many diplomatic arguments, sanctions are indeed a perfectly reasonable and effective way of addressing issues.  They worked perfectly well in Iraq until the US invaded them anyway.  They worked extremely well in the former Yugoslavia, and have curbed many of the worst excesses of Iran.  But that only works when you control the money supply.  The US, unfortunately, has abused that privilege for completely unrelated reasons, and now there is a method of permanently removing that control.  It is what it is.<p>The fireworks haven&#x27;t even started in this space yet.