Another day, another answer to “What is Bitcoin good for?”

This time the answer is “In case the government of the current global hegemon imposes economic sanctions against your company or your country.” Right now that's the US, but probably ten years from now it will be the People's Republic of China.

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When reading the below, think about this: what has gone wrong with the New York Times that in an hour some random guy in Argentina can put together a much more trustworthy and complete picture of the Russian infotech economy, and its relationship with cryptocurrencies, than a Business-section article by two of their reporters? How did the New York Times fall to a level where it publishes articles that say things like, “blockchain technology, a form of computer code that is publicly viewable by anyone, anywhere”, or quotes an “expert” saying, “A Treasury designation of a crypto wallet address is not foolproof. That designated actor can still open up a new wallet elsewhere. You can do that quite easily,” without even mentioning that normally every Bitcoin transaction creates a new crypto wallet address?

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The ransomware-as-a-source-of-national-revenue thing is a red herring. The article itself says, citing https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-crypto-crime-repor... (use Reader mode):

> Last year, about 74 percent of global ransomware revenue, or more than [US]$400 million worth of cryptocurrency, went to entities that are probably affiliated with Russia in some way...

But Russia's GDP is US$1.7 trillion per year [edit: corrected from 4.3, which is the PPP number], so ransomware extortion is about potentially as much as 0.03% of Russia's GDP — maybe 0.06% if they can double it. And Bitcoin transaction volume is currently about US$30 billion per day, and has been for about a year, according to https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-sentinusd.html#.... This annualizes to US$11 trillion per year, so the cited US$0.4 billion per year is about 0.004% of total Bitcoin transaction volume. (Also, the US$0.4 billion cited is partly in other coins, and presumably there's a much larger off-chain transaction volume in Bitcoin within exchanges like Coinbase and Binance.)

I wonder why Emily Flitter and David Yaffe-Bellany, or their editors at the New York Times, didn't include these figures? Perhaps they didn't think they were relevant to contextualizing the ransomware numbers? Did they not know that Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency and think to check its transaction volume? Did they not think about checking Russia's GDP, which show that there are roughly 1500 rubles of "value" produced in Russia—and potentially exported!—for every ruble earned from ransomware?

I'd think the most likely Russian recipients of Bitcoin from abroad are Russian programmers and legitimate software services firms, which amount to a much larger fraction of the Russian GDP than ransomware gangs, 2.7% (though they say US$24.8 billion/year, which works out to 1.5%?) according to https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/russia-infor... (https://web.archive.org/web/20220221174104/https://www.trade...). There are a huge number of excellent Russian programmers, and Russian companies pay utter shit, so getting paid by foreign companies is a big deal to them. And they'll be much quicker to adopt Bitcoin than, like, Gazprom.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-42855-6_..., by contrast, claims Russia's "digital economy" is 3.9% of Russia's GDP.

I wonder why Flitter and Yaffe-Bellany didn't mention Russian software services companies, which are apparently about 60 times the size of the ransomware sector?

This article is not labeled as an editorial. What has gone wrong with the New York Times?

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While Russia's government should clearly not be invading Ukraine, because military invasions are horrific, would it improve the situation for Russia and Ukraine to be governed by the American voting public that voted in Donald Trump and Joe Biden, which was so strongly in favor of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan that it re-elected George W. Bush? Or is it better if Russia and Ukraine can trade with other countries whether or not the American voting public approves of their foreign policy? (Note that right now the US has imposed economic sanctions against two Ukrainian legislators specifically because of the opinions they've expressed in the press.)

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Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30435990