With bitcoin/binance still allowing russia to move money about, is anybody abandoning it? I don't feel comfortable using it, but also if it becomes their only way to fund themselves, the government will push through new tax laws on it and throttle it anyway. Or just outright ban people from using it.

Funding a war is one of the occassions where decentralised financing becomes a major problem.

That was the entire idea behind crypto, turning it into a dark business financing/money laundering central with a sprinkle of ridiculous ancap "philosophy" of "regulations bad". There is a reason 19th century socialists fought for central banking; it, in general, allows much more democratic control over the economy.

If so far, you havn't cared about the huge environmental footprint of crypto currencies and neither about their use by drug cartels and dictatorships like North Korea, then why would you care now?

Oh no, Russia uses crypto.

You had your chance to add rules to usage, that ship sailed years ago.

@Fast-Nop tbh I haven't dabbled that much in it but either way I certainly hadn't considered the bigger picture until now.

@C0D4 not sure I had any say in how they built the system :D

@ojt-rant oh nyo, it's like no one ever told that cryptocurrencies are an utterly shitty idea.

There is something worse than an outright ban.
They can "de-legitimize" a part of your wallet and still tax the whole thing.
Imagine that you can only ever convert coins into legal tender up to the "legitimate" balance of your account - i.e. the wallets that have given you the coins in the past are kosher themselves.
You may be the best goody two-shoes around, but if someone that have given you coins (even if legally) later pulls a Theranos, then those coins are dust. Your money is no good anymore, because no one would dare touch it.
But you still have to pay taxes on it, because of course you do.
Dirty coins are worth less than 0.

weirdly, almost straight after writing this, where I live have started charging a 27% tax on any profit made with cryptocurrency, effective immediately

@JsonBoa I had an idea a few yers ago of a digital currency that had a cleanliness record - sort of like a secondary worth to each coin. So the more good things that were done with a coin, the higher its worth would be. 10 clean coins for example could be the same worth as 100 dirtier coins. And those coins could be cleaned over time by being used for good things.

Then I realised it's money, and all money is dirty.

@ojt-rant that's actually a good thing I see in crypto. A dollar bill might have been anywhere, but in crypto you can track the provenance.
And dirty coins can be treated using the "dual pile algorithm".

Imagine that each person has two wallets - a "clean" (C) and a "dirty" (D). Every deposit and withdraw is a push or a pop at the top of one of the piles.
Initially, you do all your transactions in your C pile. A simple Blockchain search give us the state of your pile before and after each transaction, so you can track the source wallet of each fraction of your balance
So, that freelance job you did last year? Turns out that was for a illegal landfill company, and your country is now sanctioning it. You create a temp wallet "T", transfer the still-clean top of C to T, transfers the dirty amount of C to D, and brings back the contents of T

D is now your dirty balance. You might still use it, but probably at a great discount. And D will probably be taxed as if it was worth as much as C

@JsonBoa it's a nice concept though, right? I'm less likely to deal with people with a wallet full of dirty money too

@JsonBoa

So you can do nothing wrong and still be punished for it? BRILLIANT! If you spend your "dirty" money before it gets dirty the track record follows to hurt some poor guy down the line who had nothing to do with it or is it enough to just launder it by sending it to your SO?

@msdsk welcome to the desert of the real world. It sucks so hard.
But, yeah, shit works as you said - it wasn't designed to be like this, but shit happens anyway, and this system is but a flimsy attempt to give you the choice of either take the fall for someone else's fault, or pass the hot potato ahead before it bursts.

@msdsk its history will be recorded, people will know whether a coin has been used for good or bad and can avoid it if they wish. But money is money to some. That's the way the world works.

@ojt-rant At some point, all of the money will have a "dirty" history.

@Fast-Nop very true. Then we perform a rug pull and do one :)

@JsonBoa

I'm not sure if I could come up with something more immoral than this

@msdsk sure you can - we believe in you