12 Comments
founding

Interested to hear you discuss on this site or some Monday evening how this move does or doesn’t change your perception of Bitcoin. (Not “crypto”, just Bitcoin.). Canada’s freezing of the assets of truckers and people who may have donate $50 to them, then within a month an entire country’s “bank account” getting frozen. Permission-less money is sounding less crazy every day.

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author

"Permission-less money is sounding less crazy every day." And also sounding less tolerable to governments. "Don't let crypto help Russia" is the latest rallying cry for those who want to regulate crypto.

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True, but the kind of laws needed to prevent transacting bitcoin would require an end to nearly all “human rights”.

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author

Which is looking like a plausible scenario

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Even in the distopian scenario, the value of Bitcoin rises relative to the dollar.

The case relative to gold is still unknown.

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https://youtu.be/LHH10jIRJmQ

2016 documentary on Ukraine and the 2014 coup by Oliver stone.

Quickly being flagged and taken down, watch while you can.

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The answers always come at the margins. The dollar isn't risk free, but neither is anything else. The dollar holds as long as it's relatively less risky than the alternatives. What assets are less risky? In the grand scheme of things, it seems like the options are:

1) Develop alternative media of exchange (because that's obviously the primary reason the dollar is an asset).

or

2) Trade less

There's a great deal of ruin in the dollar, I think.

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"neither is anything else." This is the key issue - and crypto doesn't really solve it, not even XMR (Monero).

But China-Russia, and likely China plus other countries, have long been slightly pushing the renminbi, and these sanctions are likely to be a huge increase to transition Russia Oil > China in renminbi, so Russia can buy more Chinese stuff.

OTOH, the Chinese trading partners are more afraid of China than of the USA.

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The undermining of the dollar, or not, is a great, relevant topic for any seminar on banking. I hope you're prepared to tell us what you know, and have some good questions about the issues that you don't know. (My short guess is "only a little, but ..." as alternatives firm up, the undermining increases.)

Looking forward to your live seminar comments about US dollar reserve currency advantages and its place in international finance.

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It seems to me like a moment when China could act strategically to end the dollar as the reserve currency, but not to become the reserve currency itself. For example, it could shift all its dollar-based reserves into silver and then introduce silver coinage for circulation as its actual currency. That feels like it could kill the dollar as a reserve currency, but it would require the Chinese government to give us one of the ways it controls its own economy, and make it less resilient to changes in the terms of trade.

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"Going forward, if dollars are no longer the risk-free asset, that is a change to the financial system with consequences that are difficult to predict. Some day, we may look back on this as the most significant outcome of the Russian invasion of Ukraine."

Let's hope so!

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Why should china keep storing dollars if they are worthless when you need them?

Another big development is that the military industrial complex just massively increased. The Germans are going to buy lots of f35s, probably more then the entire gdp of ukraine

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