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Bitcoin The Almighty Buck

Russia To Allow Crypto Payments in International Trade To Counter Sanctions (yahoo.com) 114

Russian lawmakers passed a bill on Tuesday that will allow businesses to use crypto currencies in international trade, as part of efforts to skirt Western sanctions imposed after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. From a report: The law is expected to go into force in September, and Russian central bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina, one of the backers of the new law, said the first transactions in cryptocurrencies will take place before the end of the year. Russia has faced significant delays in international payments with major trading partners such as China, India and the United Arab Emirates after banks in those countries, under pressure from Western regulators, became more cautious.

"We are taking a historic decision in the financial sphere," the head of the Duma lower house of parliament, Anatoly Aksakov, told lawmakers. Under the new law, the central bank will create a new "experimental" infrastructure for cryptocurrency payments. Details of the infrastructure have yet to be announced.

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Russia To Allow Crypto Payments in International Trade To Counter Sanctions

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  • Since Crypto is not actually anonymous and all transactions are necessarily public record, I guess we'll just have to sanction and/or seize the property of the crypto exchanges that are, ironically, the linchpin of the whole system.

    Whoops.
    =Smidge=

    • The exchange that is in Russia, do you mean? They're gonna send the FBI to Russia?

      But yeah, blockchain transactions are hardly anonymous these days, but if it's just because the banks are being overly cautious & this provides a way to circumvent those banks, it could work.

      Just goes to show the kinds of people that blockchain attracts, you know, war criminals, organised crime, oligarchs, etc..
      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Eunomion ( 8640039 )
        If the exchange is in Russia, every crook in the world outside of Russia will rob it with impunity. Who is the Kremlin going to complain to?
        • Re:Okay well (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Moryath ( 553296 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2024 @01:58PM (#64667474)

          Putin's KBG will be involved in more 'extracurricular activities' than usual. Either to catch those involved in thefts, or to make sure Putin gets his cut.

          But really, all this is doing is proving the point: cryptocurrencies are a scam used primarily for crime and money laundering.

          • Yup, crypto is pure scam. I don't even see how it's worthwhile for Putin: Sending out the KGB to enforce a crypto exchange seems like a massive expense.
            • KGB? Are you still on 1970s cold-war propaganda?! Don't you know that the KGB was dissolved in 1995?
              • It's a figure of speech, FFS. Nobody cares what three-letter sequence means "Russian psychos being degenerate" this week.
                • It does matter because which agency you're dealing with makes a big difference. For example, dealing with the FBI, maybe you've got a chance but the CIA? You're totally screwed & there's no way out.
          • But I wouldn't underestimate what other state actors are capable of. If you think it's just going to be run of the mill criminals ripping off Russian cryptocurrency exchanges you haven't been paying attention. Every country on the planet will be hacking in and pretending to be regular thieves.
          • by hey! ( 33014 )

            Yeah, but while the FSB would certainly be willing to do stuff like that, we shouldn't ascribe to it superhuman capabilities. Tracking down and unmasking a organized crime ring in another country is a tall order, even if that is a largely open country.

            Also, likely some of the groups hacking the Russian exchanges will have connections to agencies with "national means".

      • The exchange that is in Russia, do you mean? They're gonna send the FBI to Russia?

        No, the onus will be on the exchanges operating in countries that do have sanctions against Russia to prove they're not enabling circumvention of the financial sanctions.

        Russia's shitcoins aren't worth anything if you can't turn them back into cash outside of Russia.

      • Well I guess our own hackers here in the West (inclduing Ukraine) will just have to hack those Russian crypto exchanges, drain them, and wreck them. War is hell!
    • by Plugh ( 27537 )

      Crypto is not actually anonymous

      One particular crypto really is anonymous [invidious.private.coffee] with an encrypted blockchain [invidious.private.coffee] and many dozens of .onion nodes [monero.fail].

      For the last few years vendors on Darknet marketplaces use it preferably or even exclusively.

      SHUM! [shum.fyi]

      • The entire point of a blockchain - a necessary precondition of its function - is that you have an indelible ledger of transactions. Onion nodes don't help either because each block necessarily includes a sender, amount, and recipient.

        Fundamentally crypto isn't any more anonymous than an IP address, and this is entirely be design. It's necessary to trust it as a currency. You can obfuscate, but that's not anonymous. What's that mantra again? Obfuscation is not security? And as soon as you try to move the fun

        • How about you educate yourself a bit before commenting, or like, just click on the links Plugh has sent. Monero is anonymous. Tor is just extra layer of protection to prevent attacks that would tie user actions in a specific timestamp to a blockchain event
  • You can only ignore a new technology that allows an international money transfer free-for-all for so long until eventually, your enemies publicly use it to bypass war sanctions. Time for first-world countries to choose, are they finally going to terminate cryptocurrency trading with extreme prejudice like they did with all prior Internet funny-money schemes, or allow the public mockery of any control over international finance to reach its peak?

  • by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2024 @01:29PM (#64667356)

    Leave Ukraine and stop the war you started.

    • by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2024 @01:37PM (#64667396)

      It's far, far past that. I think Putin's over-committed and failure is not an option. His grip on power will weaken if he calls for a retreat... and the invasion of Ukraine was because he and the rest of the oligarchs were killing Russia by bleeding it so badly they needed a new territory to exploit to prop it up.

      The only way to stop the war now is Putin's assassination and his replacement demonizing him to avoid blame, and honestly I thought the right people in Russia would have figured that out over a year ago... so Putin's obviously crafty enough to prevent it.

      • There are 2 other ways the war can stop.

        Russia can be defeated on the battlefield.
        Ukraine can be defeated on the battlefield.

        Waiting for a unique event like an assassination isn't a plan. And the people you seem to think should be assassinating him are making big bucks and living the life with him in charge. They have no reason to care about the bloody stalemate going on in Ukraine.

        • by Moryath ( 553296 )

          And the people you seem to think should be assassinating him are making big bucks and living the life with him in charge.

          Well there was this one guy named Yevgeny... [pbs.org]

        • >They have no reason to care about the bloody stalemate going on in Ukraine.

          The end is near for Russia, the absolute authoritarian /absolute kleptocracy model is only sustainable for a relatively short period.

          All directions are downward for Putin, but a smart oligarch might figure out they could drain a little less blood from Russia, sacrifice Putin to the wolves, and keep the game going for the rest of their life for themselves.

          That was my perhaps naÃve hope for Ukraine, anyway.

          • I would wish for the same, but unfortunatey, current russia's mafia state demise is not near. It has survived worse condition, and the whole fsb gang is so tied in the roots that it is not really posdible to "kill putin by oligarchs"
        • Russia can be defeated on the battlefield.
          Ukraine can be defeated on the battlefield.

          In either case, Putin will then have a NATO country on his border, just as he feared.

      • I think you are right, though also wrong... I think the people who would arrange for a trigger to be pulled are also the people who would be afraid of who would slide into the created power vacuum. Now, if you flew a coupla dozen stealthy bombers over the Kremlin and dropped leaflets saying, "Hey, stop this shit or we will stop you" in Russian of course, that may have some set of effects, one of which may be for Putin to rethink his situation, though, honestly, dropping a coupla hundred weapons on the Kreml
        • by Moryath ( 553296 )

          Sadly, Russia is a (failed but still) nuclear power. The tier-1 countries in the world aren't going to do something that Putin or his potential successors see as an existential threat, even though Russia has fallen from "superpower" to "near peer" and now "second tier falling fast."

          The real world powers are hoping that they can wait him out, that the cancer will end Putin quietly and the worst they have to deal with is infighting among his wannabe-successors. If they try to directly assassinate Putin, the

        • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

          dropping a coupla hundred weapons on the Kremlin may be the smarter move.

          Brilliant. Let's start WW3 and get nuked because you only have one left-wing source of news and you're easily manipulated. Russia has nuclear subs, ICBMs, strategic bombers, and hypersonic nukes. There is no defense against ICBMs, genius. You wouldn't even have time to hear about it on the news and celebrate before you were vaporized in a millisecond by the retaliation.

          • They don't move that fast. But the continued destabilization of Russia does make me wonder how close the plans are for a first strike to take their ICBMs off the table. After the army's performance in Ukraine, the subs and aircraft are presumably held together with bailing wire, but if the guys manning the silos haven't black marketed the fuel and engines already the ICBMs could still be dangerous.
            • what worries me is that those ICBM's haven't been getting any maintenance to speak of... so, in my mind, they are more a threat to the surrounding nations than to anyone else.
            • I'm more of the opinion they'd be lucky to have an ICBM left than can leave a silo or launch tube, even luckier if it had a working warhead.

              Those things are hellishly expensive to maintain and not only does Russia not have the budget for it, but everybody who can get away with it steals to get by. If you could steal from the nuclear warhead budget, you'd kind of be a fool not to - if they fail on deployment, you're already about to die in a nuclear war anyway. You might as well have some extra wealth unti

          • Are you suggesting the true and proven "peace in our time" strategy, Neville?

        • I think you are right, though also wrong... I think the people who would arrange for a trigger to be pulled are also the people who would be afraid of who would slide into the created power vacuum. Now, if you flew a coupla dozen stealthy bombers over the Kremlin and dropped leaflets saying, "Hey, stop this shit or we will stop you" in Russian of course, that may have some set of effects, one of which may be for Putin to rethink his situation, though, honestly, dropping a coupla hundred weapons on the Kremlin may be the smarter move. Turn the whole complex into rubble.

          Yeah, I said it. Let the hate mail come.

          So, General Fuckwit, explain to your fellow US citizens which coastal cities you're prepared to sacrifice. Just New York and LA?

      • It's far, far past that. I think Putin's over-committed and failure is not an option. His grip on power will weaken if he calls for a retreat...

        Agreed, but Russia still has plenty of high-story windows Putin can throw opponents out of.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • I honestly don't know how the Russian move to cryptocurrency will work out for the Russian Federation or the rest of the world, but there are two noteworthy observations to share: One, this new Kremlin policy demonstrates that Western sanctions against Russia are clearly having a painful effect on the Kremlin's ability to generate income, in spite of all the Vatnik troll commentary to the contrary. Two, it is VERY important to recall that the Soviet Union reported positive GDP right up to the last month be
      • Because the exact same thing is going to happen in America if we fall to fascism this year.

        Dictators usually need to counteract their mismanagement through imperialism. You have to send your armies to go plunder in order to cover up your incredible incompetence at running a country.
      • This war will end and it will end with Ukraine giving up territory. It's that simple. A cease fire with those terms has already been on the table and rejected following pressure from the U.S. and U.K.

        • This war will end and it will end with Ukraine giving up territory.

          This war will end and it will end with Russia leaving Ukraine and paying reparations for the death and destruction they caused. It's that simple.

    • The war started as a civil war within Ukraine following a violent overthrow of the democratically elected government. Now you might say that Russia had no right to involve themselves in that war, but that is up for debate.

      • The war started as a civil war within Ukraine following a violent overthrow of the democratically elected government.

        This again is factually incorrect. The war with Russia started during Maidan in which the sitting president (A Russian puppet) whose own party left him completely lost his legitimacy and fled like a coward. The president was then Impeached/fired/kicked to the curb by vote of the Ukrainian parliament 328 to 0. There was no overthrow of government, there was no coup.

        Asserting this constituted a violent overthrow would be the equivalent of saying had Nixon not resigned and was instead successfully impeached

  • by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2024 @01:43PM (#64667412)

    It's a financial instrument, there will be an exchange. And especially in the amounts Russia would try to move, very traceable in a public ledger.

    I wouldn't want to be the guy found making black market deals with Russia via Bitcoin. I doubt it would go well.

    • the amounts Russia would try to move, very traceable in a public ledger.

      One small problem: they don't give a fuck and are nuclear armed. What are we going to do in retaliation, exactly?

      • Wrong end of the transaction; it'd be the guy in a country that cares that deals with the fallout.

        Russia needs crypto to deal with countries that are refusing to deal with it - it doesn't need it for China, North Korea, or Iran... and probably has ways of working with Hungary.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Not all cryptocurrencies have public ledgers. Some offer truly anonymous transactions, such as Monero and Zcash. Bitcoin is often laundered by simply exchanging it into Monero and then back out.

    • I wouldn't want to be the guy found making black market deals with Russia via Bitcoin. I doubt it would go well.

      From the summary:

      Russia has faced significant delays in international payments with major trading partners such as China, India and the United Arab Emirates after banks in those countries, under pressure from Western regulators, became more cautious.

      These aren't transactions from parties in countries that have sanctions on Russia, they're transactions between China and other countries that don't have sanctions. The problem is the traditional global payment networks are controlled by the West. The crypto net

    • On an industrial scale now and officially sanctioned by the state. It's going to be bad news for crypto because it's going to force Europe and the United States to finally get serious about money laundering in the cryptocurrency space which they have been doing their level headed best to pretend isn't a thing.
  • Russia has faced significant delays in international payments

    Payments from Russia to China can take up to half a year to process, and most bank transfer are returned [businessinsider.com]. This is due to the sanctions the West has imposed on Russia for its invasion. Every time Russia tries to find a new way to route money, it gets smacked down.

    Earlier this month, a top Russian banker said the sanctions-evading methods should be made a "state secret" because they keep getting shut down so fast.

    "Whatever steps we take, we can see that the reaction is very quick," said Andrei Kostin, the CEO of VTB Bank, Russia's second-largest lender.

    With as slow as crypto is to process, this isn't going to help the situation.

  • How will this work? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by GlennC ( 96879 )

    The way I understand it is that Russia wants to buy stuff but can't because of sanctions. If the intent of using crypto is to bypass the sanctions, who is going to be stupid enough to give Russia actual physical things in exchange for a series of ones and zeroes?

    Especially given that those ones and zeroes can't easily be exchanged for real money since by trying to do so you tank the market for ones and zeroes while using the equivalent of a small nation's electrical generation capacity in the process.

    Maybe

    • If the intent of using crypto is to bypass the sanctions, who is going to be stupid enough to give Russia actual physical things in exchange for a series of ones and zeroes?

      Especially given that those ones and zeroes can't easily be exchanged for real money since by trying to do so you tank the market for ones and zeroes

      TFA doesn't say, but here's one possible scenario:

      1. Bitcoin/Monero/whatever is mined inside of Russia
      2. The importing firm exchanges RUB for the miner's crypto
      3. Money transfer occurs on the blockchain (this is where the sanctions are avoided).
      4. The recipient, perhaps a Chinese firm, exchanges the BTC received for CNY at an exchange.

      As for tanking the price of the crypocurrency, sure, that could be a problem, but in large, lopsided volumes. But the TFA says that the government will allow (not force) busin

    • They can pay bribes to right wing politicians again. They are really suffering without their patron

    • I think the issue is that most of the intermediaries in the world banking system are constrained by the sanctions. Even if a bank is in China, it still wants to stay in the good graces of the West and therefore has pressure to abide by the sanctions. A crypto transaction between Russian and Chinese businesses would get around this issue of requiring the intermediary bank.

  • by Lavandera ( 7308312 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2024 @02:44PM (#64667644)

    Is it the reason why Trump loves crypto now?

    He was against but changed mind couple days ago...

    • He's probably getting paid off in crypto for being Putins' tool. I imagine Trumps' handler (Melania) is probably getting paid in crypto for 'handling' Trump, too.
    • I think he was talking at a crypto event to crypto enthusiasts. I doubt Trump has any understanding of crypto, but he usually knows enough not to insult his audience. Usually.

    • Is it the reason why Trump loves crypto now?

      He was against but changed mind couple days ago...

      DJ Trump, last Sunday Jul 27, 2024, "I will be a Bitcoin President" [youtube.com]

      Donald Trump: Our country is blessed to have the extraordinary talent, energy and genius represented in this room. It really is great genius. Not all of you, but most of you, many of you, this is the kind of spirit that built America. This is the spirit that's going to help us make America great again. That's what we're doing. I stand before you today filled with respect and admiration for what the Bitcoin community has achieved. It's incre

  • Russia does not have a problem receiving shipments of anything. They have a problem paying for it later. Credit can only go so far. We are not talking about the government proper either but actual free market businesses. The government can trade oil for anything. Including bitcoin. Bitcoin accounts don't tell you who owns them. Russia can set up an infrastructure to anonymize transactions from their country and any one else in the world that would also care to do so. Russian businesses transactions still go

  • The day that Uncle Sam can no longer enforce international treaties and stop money laundering is the day he must act.

    It is very interesting that this revelation coincides with Trump announcing that the US must have a strategic stockpile of Bitcoin. I bet one of his big donors would love to dump their massive stash of Bitcoin.

    As a US taxpayer, I don't want my tax dollars put into something as risky as Bitcoin. Something is rotten here, I can smell it.

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