[xbar]

Comments this morning seem very aggressive-defensive. How about a different takeway: cryptocurrency defeats current international sanction tools.

Whatever your feelings about US/Iran or your feelings about Bitcoin/Climate Change, sanctions have been an effective peace-time tool for the UN to bring countries to the negotiating table. Perfectly effective? No. Security Council politically motivated? Yes.

Better than war for the citizens of all countries? Yes.

Will Bitcoin lead to more war as a result of weakening the power of sanctions? I wouldn't hazard a guess. But I didn't see this possibility coming.

[StanislavPetrov]

>cryptocurrency defeats current international sanction tools.

If one values international law, or the, "international order" (as Secretary of State Blinken put it, without irony), then a bright line needs be drawn between, "international sanction tools" that are used by the UN and the unilateral sanctions issued by the US.

>Will Bitcoin lead to more war as a result of weakening the power of sanctions?

Bellicose nations have always issued demands to other sovereign nations backed by the threat of illegal wars of aggression. Will the ability of targeted nations to avoid being starved to death via the use of bitcoin lead to more war? Possibly, but is the problem there really bitcoin, or rogue nations who consider themselves above international law?

[Udik]

> cryptocurrency defeats current international sanction tools

Yes, exactly. They (in part) defeat an act of unilateral violence, one that is very cheap for the perpetrator, from one country against another. Which seems a very good thing.