What Russia did was a very right decision by making a regulation that they will make international payments with bitcoin, of course this is a reflection of the future. In addition, as we all know, Western countries are indeed aggressively imposing sanctions and even making it difficult for Russia to trade with major partners such as China or Turkey. On the other hand, many local banks refuse to transact with Russian companies to avoid supervision from Western regulators, especially the US.

So the steps taken by Russia are the right steps to fight the US. Russia chose Bitcoin as a means of transaction in international trade because they know that no one in the world can regulate Bitcoin. My hope is that with the policies currently being implemented by Russia, other countries will follow suit and abandon the dollar and use bitcoin.

This happened a few years ago, and I don't think it had anything to do with the fact that the forum is somehow US-based, or maybe even the fact that cryptocurrencies are discussed here. If I remember correctly, that ban came from some Russian ministry that has nothing to do with finance or anything similar.

However, those who are corrupt and behave like dictators do not need an excuse to forbid something, they simply do it.

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Nothing matters as long as the price of BTC goes up, not even all the suffering and destruction happening in 21st century Europe. I have a similar opinion as you, but most people on this forum are completely fascinated with any news coming out of Russia or China and don't care that the average citizen of those countries will not benefit from what their governments are doing with BTC.

It's never been surprised for me to hear that. It's not only Russia, but all of parties who get economic sanctions may be also using as well i.e North Korean. I remember when Putin outlaw Bitcoin a few years ago, and he's changing his mind now.

It seems to me they can use Bitcoin to avoid the sanction, but there are no much free spaces available for them. I wonder what's Putin's motive to tell public if his country used bitcoin.

That's not entirely correct though. They want to create a new payment system that the US regime can not control, censor, sanction and turn into a weapon against everyone. They do want control.

In fact one of the reasons why development of BRICS currency is slow and we barely saw BRICS-Pay recently, is because each member wants to push their own fiat, specifically China and Russia. In that sense there is no difference between them and US. Like China that wants to push Yuan and replace US and in a couple of years they turn Yuan into a weapon against others just like US did with the dollar!

From our perspective, sure. But from the perspective of governments, not at all. They all hate bitcoin because they cannot control it, they can not print more of it, they can not censor its transactions, etc. So they will definitely create a new currency or maybe more of a new payment system from scratch so that they can control it!

Ever since their sanctions happened, they seem to have been creative to get around this and when I read about their support for crypto coming from our Soviet friends ...I knew this was a bypass of the system and it works in their favour if you ask me and hope this won't negatively affect the markets bullish tread at the moment when the dots are connected by everyone else.

Sounds like... NATO.

Remember those 2 trillion $$$ down the drain?

They could improve the US infrastructure and US citizens' lives, but no, the war was more important...

Or maybe not:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuOcnGAv4oo

The network is decentralized. Saying that a single entity ("the collective West") will control 90% of the hashrate is a pipe dream.

Even in that case, even if Russia controlled only 10% of the hashrate, there would still be 10% chance to include their transaction in the blockchain.

Also, don't forget that Russia has vast amounts of natural gas to feed ASICs.

The West on the other hand doesn't like gas, they prefer renewable energy, which doesn't offer 24/7/365 reliability.

Guess who's more likely to have the vast majority of the hashrate in the end?

There are ways to hide traces, especially if you own miners.

They don't want that. Fiat as a global reserve currency is a historical anomaly. Gold had that role for thousands of years.

We're going back to the Gold Standard, only with a digital twist this time around. History will repeat itself.

Countries with big BTC reserves will claim that their CBDC is more "valuable" vs others. You've heard this here first.

Also, China is not like USA.

USA imposed the dollar not just by force/military violence, but also via entertainment/cultural warfare (Hollywood movies describing the "American dream" and even cartoons depicting greenbacks -> they try to brainwash impressionable little kids and they're pretty good at it judging by this forum)!

China has nothing like that culturally (and besides that, most people don't speak Chinese), so you can forget the yuan conquering the world.

They don't need to rob anything when they have valuable resources to trade.

Russia has wheat/oil/gas.

China has electronics and in-house microchips (not as advanced as TSMC's so far, but you can imagine what will happen after Taiwan's invasion -> they just want to reverse-engineer ASML's EUV machines).

Imagine if the collective West sanctions/bans Made in China electronics... imagine an nVidia GPU skyrocketing from $500 to $10000 in a single day due to scarcity!

People will remember the 2013/2017/2021 GPU mining craze as something insignificant compared to what's coming next.

I definitely expect the West to shoot themselves in the foot once again -> hyperinflation kicking in -> no more fiat/cash -> welcome CBDC.

That would have been true if China and Russia haven't been trading using Yuan over the past couple of years.

That is one approach but you are forgetting that CBDC can also be flexible. There can be a fixed "swap" rate for different CBDCs which can be agreed upon between different nations. Then they can easily trade with each using their own CBDC.

That's not specific to Russia. With my edits in your comment, all your statements are still true!

After all the $12 trillion US regime wasted on wars for 20+ years, all which they lost is coming back to bite them in the behind...

This could very well work for them, they used to be quite anti-bitcoin, I remember times when they caused problems with users as well, so the fact that they started to like it more and more because of sanctions shows another benefit of bitcoin, to certain nations.

I believe we could make a good return from this if we could see Russia use bitcoin too much, that would require them or whoever they make a deal with to get a lot of bitcoin, in billions, which could make it so that bitcoin could grow in price thanks to this. I do not know if they started already, maybe this big increase had something to do with Russia, or maybe it was just Trump, or maybe it was pure bull run after halving that we always have.

Those are all very possible reasons and I believe that we are going to end up with some good changes, it is going to end up with something that will take some time, so we need to consider how things could change, we are going to end up with something profiting for us, and that's all that matters.