Question is: why are these sanctions here in the first place? The US uses its control of the Dollar-based system to wield its power as it sees fit. It’s apparently ok for the US to have as many nukes as it sees fit, but not ok for others to have the same.
Iran is being sanctioned for multiple reasons. The primary one is because they ratified the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), but then (allegedly) violated the terms. That treaty comes with a mix of benefits and responsibilities, and it specifically calls out the permanent Security Council members (including the US) as being allowed to have nukes. If Iran wanted to have nukes then they should have never ratified the treaty in the first place.
Case in point, though: US is allowed nukes because they are “special”, the rest cannot.
On “state sponsor of terrorism”, perhaps it’s time for the US to realise it’s a case of the pot calling the kettle back: 70+ years of clandestine operations supporting iron-fisted right-wing regimes in Indonesia (Suharto), Chile (Pinochet), Cuba (Bay of Pigs invasion / project Mongoose), Nicaragua (Contras), Iraq (Hussein prior to the US flipping on him in the invasion of Iraq), DRC (assassination of Lumumba) etc. My point here is not to be a dick, but simply to show that the US itself has sponsored hordes of so-called “state terrorists” and they get to pick and choose who is a terrorist or not based on some list in the State Department. That is not right.
What's your point? No one forced Iran to ratify the NPT. They did so voluntarily, and thus agreed to give up development of nuclear weapons. Whether it's fair or right in your opinion is utterly irrelevant.
There is no question that Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism. They have literally given weapons and funding to terrorist groups which killed Americans and our allies. If Iran (or other countries) want to also designate the USA as a state sponsor of terrorism under their national laws and impose economic sanctions on us then they're free to do so.
> why are these sanctions here in the first place?
Initially they were a response to the Iran Hostage Crisis. Since the Clinton administration, the reasons have been Iran's nuclear program and support for groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas.
> It’s apparently ok for the US to have as many nukes as it sees fit, but not ok for others to have the same.
This isn't just a US goal. 190 countries have agreed to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Prime example of US rhetoric though. The US is allowed nukes because they see themselves as the “benevolent dictator” of the world and only real superpower. Therefore “we” can hold nukes and tell everyone else what to do.
On Hamas, it’s a great example of why the US system of designating who is a “terrorist” or not simply doesn’t work. In Palestine, Hamas are central to the liberation of Palestine from Israeli acts of aggression and terror against the Palestinians. Some would call them rebels or legitimate, organised political groups (as with PLO). Hamas have done a lot of wrong things and I’m not defending them. My point is merely to prove that just because it’s on a US list, doesn’t mean it is right.
Cause alot of regional ex-empires want to be empire again instead of the empire. Some of those empires, align with the us interests, others muddle through (turkey), others align with opposing ex-empires (syria) and some try to win it stand-alone (Iran).
The ferrocity of american hatred also seems to increase, the more cultural similarity there is. Russia with its redneck culture and iranians with there crazy almost protestant messianic streak, are to much of a mirror to not bark and bite at.
Crypto is to find out about the ten dolar wench as the ultimate key..
I 100% agree. The US recently added additional sanctions on China for chip making technology simply because China has improved their domestic chip manufacturing capabilities. There is no possible justification for the US getting to decide what products other countries are allowed to research and manufacture.
The chinese have stolen enough IP to make this and other ventures of theirs possible, they absolutely get to feel at the very least some repercussion for it and should be treated as a thief in your home.
"IP" is a fiction invented to justify collecting rent from unproductive assets and ultimately serves to prevent underdeveloped countries from developing industrial capacity. Every industrialized country in the world (including the US) "stole IP" when they were developing.
I didn't claim China was underdeveloped. They're very obviously the premier industrial power in the world.
The people demanding ahistorical special privileges are so-called "intellectual property holders". I have zero sympathies for the plight of these parasitical rent collectors. They certainly don't hold any special sympathies for the American people.
I'm not sure what you mean by "ahistorical special privileges". Intellectual property rights have been around for centuries. Patents and copyright are specifically mentioned in the Constitution.
What's your point? Countries have always spied on each other. It would have been entirely reasonable for those European countries to sanction the USA for IP violations.
Ok, but the "powerful" in this situation are not looking out for the interests of average working Americans, who would be best served by fair and peaceful relations with other countries. And they're not even looking out for the interest of maintaining their "power" since they continue to give the entire rest of the world more and more incentive to abandon the dollar as the global reserve currency. What will happen to the standard of living in de-industrialized America once that happens?
For miners operating in the US, I’d like to see sanctions violations cases if they mine blocks that include transactions for Iranian (and other sanctioned) entities. This seems straightforward to me. Frankly I’m quite annoyed that my democratically elected representatives’ sanctions regime is being undermined by Americans interested in a quick buck from wasting electricity with their PC.
Many terrorist groups from the Middle East use captured oil wells to fund their ventures. This gets mixed with other oil from the region via places like Turkey (a NATO ally). ISIS is reported to have made $500M in 2015 [1]. Anyway, the vast majority of the world buys this oil. This is why I say that Canada + USA which produce basically as much oil as Saudi + Russia should pull a DeBeers and sell "blood free" oil but obviously with a fun name like Freedom Oil.
This will sound harsh but I just want cheap gas. And I am not the only one. So many families are struggling to get by and anything that adds to the cost of things going up would immediately oppose it. I am all for freedom oil but not when it would likely cost me more.
You are living in the richest country of the world and you are still "struggling". Now imagine the lives of the other billions of people, and specially consider those people whose prosperity was undermined or halted by your government, just so you could have "cheap gas".
I may be an antirevolutionary to the bone, but seeing some comments like these really make me reevaluate my priors.
Lmao this is like saying the US should charge the Fed for printing dollar bills with serial numbers later found to be used abroad for prohibited purposes
Your comment is so unrealistic and glosses over so many details I wonder if you're the type of politician that gets elected by saying you'll ban the Internet or force porn sites to require identification, and then have to face reality that it's a little more complicated than that.
I wouldn't even know where to start explaining that what you're asking for is a very hard problem even for a very closed political and economical system like China.
As I understand it, Bitcoin mining involves selecting which unconfirmed transactions (mem pool transactions) to include in the block. A common algorithm for selecting them is ones with higher fees. Another aspect could be ignoring ones from sanctioned wallet IDs. If treasury.gov had a monthly-updating CSV file of wallet IDs that are sanctioned, then the person setting up the mining software could have a cron job to refresh treasury.gov's list periodically. Would that work?
I think you're saying this would be a big hassle, maybe for miners. Can you explain that more?
Just a couple examples off the top of my head (on mobile right now)
- One can create an unlimited number of addresses for a single wallet. The size of your banned_addresses.csv updated every morning is for all intents and purposes unbounded.
- The hard problem is proving if the beneficiary is an Iranian national. It's already difficult to do in the regular economy with KYC regulations and everything is government controlled (shell companies, etc.), doing so with Bitcoin is even harder. I don't mean hard as in "the US govt has the resources to do it", I mean hard as it's pretty much impossible.
Please don't take this the wrong way, but learn a little bit about Bitcoin, if you really want to do something about the problems it poses. It's overall pretty simple. Otherwise you're just another person that has strong opinions about something they don't know anything about.
How do you feel about North American urban planning? Suburban sprawl, miles and miles of asphalt to build roads, concrete and wasted space for parking lots, large and inefficient single-family homes... these are far more wasteful than someone running a computer at home. Worse still, these things are subsidized by all taxpayers, unlike a miner's electric bill.
No one is stating that this might not be an issue.
People are totally able to complain about multiple things.
But let me tell you: it's much easier to bash crypto as it's new and fresh and very scammy and bad. It's a good thing that we stand up and say no to it for now to stop the already giant waste it creates.
We don't need an Additional co2 creater with zero benefit.
anyone who equates "crypto" with "Proof of Work" shows automatically their ignorance or dishonesty when arguing.
Ethereum will switch to PoS next month, and there will be hundreds of thousands of nodes around the world, in aggregate they will run on a fraction of the energy consumed by the millions of video game consoles while idling.
By all means, complain about Proof of Work all you want but get off the high horse. Those "bashing crypto" and talk about "the waste it creates" are usually so covered in privilege they can't even be bothered to actually go to put the numbers in perspective.
Then it is not ignorance, which leaves you the alternative: dishonesty.
What really pisses me off is the perma-comment of "we don't need crypto", "there are no use cases", "it is only for scams", etc. Go ask people in Argentina how they are managing to keep some sense of financial normalcy, lots of them will tell you "crypto".
Oh yes let's ask the handful texhsavy people from Argentina.
Let's ignore how most people in El Salvador are not able to use their crypto because they don't understand it. Let's ignore that most of them not even understand lightning.
Let's ignore that the evil actors can miss use crypto as well which weakens sanctions.
Completely ignore all other obvious issues with crypto which have been brought up by me and others without any answer to them as long as there is the one person in <add country> who apparently is able to exchange their money with crypto.
Let's also ignore that plenty of people have been exchanging their unsta Le currency with other money before crypto like us or euro.
Who ever was able to exchange their money to crypto would have been able to do so without crypto...
Let's also ignore that 99,9999 % of people will be hurt by all the co2 before they have ever any benefit of crypto.
And as my final argument: crypto means that everyone who started to do it early gets more value in out of crypto as everyone after them. No one in their sane mind will ever switch their money over into crypto and loosing out by making the earlier adopters even richer.
El Salvador. CO2. These are all talking points against Bitcoin, not crypto.
You keep hitting the wrong drum. Again, get off the high horse. Come back when you understand that I am on your side in regards to Bitcoin, even though your arguments are completely misguided.
How much oil does the US consume, and how much American money goes to OPEC governments?
How much oil could be saved if the US decided to abandon this failed experiment called "American Suburbia" and started to plan for a urban environment that is not car-dependent?
Fascinating to me, because you likely know that any such declarations are wastes of time and will be unproductive. But you want this because of what it signals...
Without this power, the alternative is munitions. Is that the preference? Isn’t the non violence force projection more desirable when considering loss of life?
If your problem is with a superpower having superior force projection on the world stage, crypto doesn’t solve for that. The drone strikes and assassinations would still happen.
> "Under the 2015 agreement, Iran curbed its nuclear program in return for relief from U.S., EU and U.N. sanctions. But former U.S. President Donald Trump reneged on the nuclear deal in 2018 and restored harsh U.S. sanctions, prompting Tehran to start violating the agreement's nuclear limits about a year later"
The unstable math of the way that the U.S. democracy works means that we are going to have increasingly unstable (and therefore untrustworthy) policy responses to many world events in the next decades. Iran, and every other country on earth, now knows not to trust us, and its future actions will have that baked in. We've lost the moral high ground, and that will hurt us more than help us.
> The agency didn't specify which cryptocurrency was used in the transaction.
Interesting
So this is a non-story so far (even with the backstory of Iran doing bitcoin mining - there are pros and cons of using it, though of course it is the most likely answer)
To pay with crypto you first need to acquire it (multiple ways to do it - including not so legal ones, though I'm not saying which way might have been)
> Last year, a study found that 4.5% of all bitcoin mining was taking place in Iran...
So there is that.
But the story ultimately looks entirely based on a tweet [1] from an official that Google translates as:
> This week, the first official import order registration with #currency_currency worth 10 million dollars was successfully completed. By the end of September, the use of cryptocurrencies and smart contracts will be widespread in foreign trade with target countries.
Here mining's legality is still unclear. A lot of individuals mine bitcoin but illegally not because mining per say is illegal but because for example they mine in their farms using the cheap electricity that is being given to them for the purpose of producing crops and when government finds them I assume also takes the bitcoin they have mined.
So far the only places to fully ban cryptocurrency (afaik) have been authoritarian countries like Russia[1] and China[2]. The US banning an emerging tech would not be a good look.
Because government officials are supposed to be working for the people? Does your barber want to ban Bitcoin? The school-teacher? The doctor?
Nope. They either don't care or actually like it.
Also, "banning" things in America is close to impossible due to the populace intense distrust of the government. You can't even ban AR-15s, imagine thinking its possible to ban a piece of software running on a raspberry-pi.
>Also, "banning" things in America is close to impossible due to the populace intense distrust of the government. You can't even ban AR-15s, imagine thinking its possible to ban a piece of software running on a raspberry-pi.
Things are banned all the time in the US, including pieces of software. See Tornado Cash for an extremely recent example.
Transactions from your Bitcoin wallet can be worked out with a pen and paper, and then passed onto others by hand, entered into their Bitcoin node by typing in what's written down. By advocating banning Bitcoin, you just banned Free Speech.
US federal courts haven't interpreted it that way, and the precedent you cited isn't applicable. Financial transactions with sanctioned entities aren't entitled to First Amendment protections. The technical means are entirely irrelevant, regardless of whether the transaction is performed with paper or on a computer.
Only if you know who owns the wallets and both parties reuse their wallets.
You can then use a lawful nft sale on opensea to your “dirty” wallet to make the money look legitimate. With your defense being you merely sold the nft. You don’t know who the buyer is.
I'm pretty sure the US govt has tracked down the vast majority of who owns which wallets. If it doesn't know now it'll figure out some time in the future.
The same reason why they haven't banned Tor. We both know they can't and they know they cannot. But they will focus and chase after the privacy coins instead.
So perhaps it is time to accept and admit that some cryptocurrencies are here to stay and reject the delusion that is repeated here that all of them are going to be totally banned 100% entirely.
That's the same game though: if I know a guy who can get me weed or whatever, I will know a guy who can get me bitcoin.
And since there is no physical product or evidence it's actually much easier, my friend from Amsterdam will have a lot of trouble bringing me weed, he will have zero difficulty sending $100 worth of BTC to an address I give him.
The idea that you can just ban things and they will go away should have died with alcohol prohibitions. I guess at least no one will get killed in a war on crypto...
How does your friend from Amsterdam convert his crypto to Euros? The value of crypto more or less relies on there being an off-ramp to local currency. Also he should use Monero!
I assume somewhere on earth exchange will remain legal (eg Amsterdam). So my friend just uses services legal to him locally.
And even if it doesn't, your friendly local drug dealer, who may already be trading crypto to purchase product, will presumably offer exchange services. No one needs an exchange they can just charge a spread between people wanting to buy and those wanting to sell. That's how money change already works after all...
Where does the clean money to exchange for crypto come from if there's no legitimate on-ramp and off-ramp? You could at least exchange drugs and alcohol for dirty fiat.
It's just game theory. If banning it won't kill it (and it won't in this case), then you need to embrace it or lose out. The best they can hope for is to control the on-ramps and off-ramps.
You need to ban all on and off ramps anywhere in the world. If you can't buy or sell USD with BTC, but you can with EUR, and you can convert USD to EUR, you're back at square one, and I would argue making USD weaker in the process. No sane US government would risk losing its economic hegemony in that fashion.
Some say it's by design, but I think it's just because of how our global economy and the Internet itself works. It's fine to hate Bitcoin, but it's got this viral quality to it that it is not to be underestimated in the macroeconomic and political scale.
Not everybody lives in the United States of America. Case in point: this article.
If Iran can use Bitcoin to transfer wealth across borders, and can't convert it to (i.e. buy) USD, but can convert it to (i.e buy) EUR, the next decade in geopolitics will be very interesting.
Nope. It's not "You cannot exchange USD for bitcoin". It's "If your organization exchanges bitcoin, you're gonna get the regulatory hammer".
That affects every organization in the world that wants to do business in the united states, including shell corps, which is basically every major financial player that matters.
The next decade will be interesting but not for this.
The current price of btc is supported by large institutions. These disappear, so does the price.
> If your organization exchanges bitcoin, you're gonna get the regulatory hammer
Does the American regulatory hammer have worldwide jurisdiction? US might convince the EU to follow suit, but what if China says "sure Iran, we'll gladly buy your BTC and sell you RMB", what then? These worldwide regulatory hammers that pretty much everybody (not just in the Western world) respects are called embargoes. Good luck embargoing China.
Unless by regulatory hammer you mean the US military, then yes, there's a chance they could do something, but it won't be pretty for anybody. If it's just lawyers arguing, I'm telling you it's easier not to ban Bitcoin but embracing it (and extinguishing it) without weakening the US position in the world stage.
> The current price of btc is supported by large institutions.
> Does the American regulatory hammer have worldwide jurisdiction?
It has worldwide jurisdiction for any company that wants to do business with the US.
China already actively trades with Iran so this would be largely irrelevant. And yet the CFO of Huawei was still arrested a few years back for violating sanctions.
> This is just plain wrong.
You're right, there's also crime and sanctions avoiders
But kill the on ramps to clean western currency and this all falls apart.
There's still an economy. You can use decentralized exchanges like Bisq, Robosats, etc to buy and sell Bitcoin, even if they banned every centralized exchange. You can also directly transact Bitcoin for goods and services in the underground market.
