I like this because it flies a little further than some of the other explanations for puzzling aspects of events. However, it seems that all these goals could've been achieved much cheaper, with perhaps a little more time investment?
COVID would have provided a much better excuse for isolationism without sending troops anywhere. I think Russian troops in Ukraine has to be read as "Russia's rulers want to control more of that territory."
The apparent ineffectiveness may be an argument that the route to world peace is bureaucratic sclerosis and the inevitable realization of the SNAFU principle.
> it seems that all these goals could've been achieved much cheaper, with perhaps a little more time investment?
This is a massive understatement. It makes absolutely no sense in any way. The fact that the author thought it necessary to add some big introduction about their "source" in an attempt to add credibility in what is just some fantasy by someone who really doesn't like the idea of CBDCs is highly suspicious.
This is a sobering perspective for all digital currency advocates: State-owned digital currency can lead to total control of population. Putin doesn't want Ukraine, he wants to isolate Russians to better control them.
He wants both. He wants the territory, either directly or via a puppet administration and, in service of that goal, he needs to control the population. Regarding territory, he'll take what he can get. He's in Ukraine because no one stopped him after Georgia and Crimea. If he succeeds in Ukraine, he'll keep seeking more.
> State-owned digital currency can lead to total control of population.
He absolutely does not need to do this thing to have total control of the population. North Korea has total control of its population without digital currency, does it not?
The fundamental way Putin has total control of his population is by having his opponents poisoned, thrown out of windows, or into prison. He has neutered the political system around him, he's shutting down independent media, it's a crime punishable by 15 years in jail to tell anything other than his story about the war, etc.
Why does he need to do anything with a cryptocurrency? He can just keep crushing and killing people.
I can't read the article but I am already sensing from the comments that it is probably totally crackers.
Won’t alternative forms (e.g. good old fashion barter) spring up if the existing government back centralized method of value exchange becomes too repressive?
Izabella Kaminska... I always had a laugh about her features at FT I am glad she is doing the same shit posting at her own outlet. I am still not sure if she tries to do satire or if she is serious but you have to give it to her she is entertaining.
Izabella didn't write it - the top line mentions it is a guest post.
> IK – I’ve received a guest submission from an informed source that I can vouch for (to some degree). The author wishes to remain anonymous but what I can tell you is that he runs a global technology company from the UK and has close family and assets in both Russia and in China.
To the conspiratorial mind-set the world is orchestrated. Nothing happens by chance or due to the chaotic nature of life. All is planned and controlled. Putin is orchestrating everything, starting a war just to have sanctions enacted to do what he is not unilaterally able to do,) toward the end goal (like 3D chess moves,) of establishing a CBDC and isolating Russia from the west completely. (Or making a political axis of Russia / China and buffer states.)
Or not.
NONE of this seems to require the war we've seen so far...
He can kick out media folks for any reason he likes.
His war makes his military look weak / strengthened his opponent's resolve.
>Putin is not trying very hard to conquer Ukraine. His expensive weaponry is being held back – he is invading on the cheap with expendable conscripts and lots of shelling from close range.
I find this hard to buy into at this point.
I think more likely he is going to war with what he really has available.
Putin is trying very hard, but western people don't understand war and russian starting point.
* Logistics is being targeted
* Russian army relies in railroads like its 1945
* Ukraine targets logistics as the well identified weak link
* Ukraine is defended by everyone and everyone hates Russians.
* Morale is Russian army is turbo low. They dont want to kill people who could be their relatives.
* Generals on Russian side die further demoralizing them.
* They realised top is using them often as cannon fodder.
* Logistics company in US army is usually 4 times bigger than in Russian army per organisational unit of army. It means that US understand the war much better than Russia.
> Logistics company in US army is usually 4 times bigger than in Russian army per organisational unit of army. It means that US understand the war much better than Russia.
I seem to remember that this is largely based on well-known historically different assumptions between the US and Russia/USSR in case of a conflict in Europe.
US expects to fight on the ground in countries that are either allies or whose hearts and minds will need to be won. Also, US has the largest industrial capacity in the world, so they can afford to bring stuff (including chocolate and candies to give around) but they cannot afford to take stuff.
Russia/USSR expects to fight on the ground in occupied countries. Producing and bringing enough from the homeland to feed the soldiers (and the tanks) is too complicated and logistics are easy to target, so the doctrine recommends feeding from the land, aka plunder.
Barely into it and I find this nugget "His expensive weaponry is being held back" the SU-34's being shot down would disagree, and the tens of million dollar MRLSs being towed by farmers as well...
Yes Ka-52, SU-30U, Pantsir-S1, S400 (which he has like just few units produced). All of this is best possible EQ russina army has. T-80UM2 is the most modern in operation Putler has. Don't even start the talk about T-14 armata that breaks even during parade, weights 60+ tones and is made in less than 20 units entirely.
It also says Kyiv hasn't been bombed (it has, including civilian areas), that Russia hasn't used its expensive equipment (they've fired at least 600 cruise missiles at Ukraine as well as the SU-34s you mentioned, and the top-line air defense equipment we've also seen captured). Most damningly, it doesn't even mention Putin's own given revanchist explanation for the invasion, which is indeed consistent with his historic rhetoric about the region and with everything we publicly know about his thinking on Russia's position as a so-called "Great Power". Putin is also notoriously averse to technology, so it makes even less sense that he'd plan all this in order to introduce a fintech transformation that solidifies his power (which was already solid before the invasion, which has in fact lead to the largest domestic protests in Russia in decades).
It's a novelty take, rather than a serious one IMO.
Also the part about how Russia's just burning through less valuable conscripts is absolutely untrue. Very much the opposite actually. Conscripts are being held back, apparently because while families hate when their sons, brothers, fathers get killed, families REALLY hate it when said person was forced into the military
Stop making out of Putin 250 IQ genius. He overplayed his hand and now he is looking to get something out of it. He can't just walk out of Ukraine.
One thing that invalidates Your post is the logistics. You need tones and tones of material to push war effort and Ukraine destroyed rail connections to belarus and russia at the start of the war. Without good logistics you can't win war.
Other thing that is a "ps" invalidating point is that Putler commited 100% of his best soldiers to this war. Entire set of specnaz and russian marines are deployed.
It seems that if this is really what Putin wanted--and maybe he does--he could have achieved it without war. He could have just done it. It still seems like the most likely reason he did the war is that he wanted to do the war. He really does want territorial expansion of the empire; that's why he expended his influence in trying to get the US out of NATO.
During the Soviet era, when there was no official exchange between the dollar and the ruble, there was a dollar-based black market. Possibly that would return (if it isn't already).
Vitaly Gerasimov was the Chief of Staff of an army (41st Combined Arms), rather than the Army. The similarly-named Valery Gerasimov is the Chief of Staff of the Russian Armed Forces.
Chief of Staff of the 41st Army is not the same thing as Chief of Staff of the Army; the position is more equivalent to corps-level staff position in the US Army.
This article is proof that you're deep enough into crypto, you lose the ability to see any event through any other lens.
Putin's actions in Ukraine are not a great mystery, and do not require a conspiracy to impose a CBDC to explain. Putin and his circle are in complete control of Russia and Russian politics and face no meaningful domestic opposition. He has no requirement to manufacture a war or other crisis to change economic policy, no requirement to impose a CBDC to exert pressure on his population, and no requirement to exert mass control of his population at all, given his wide popularity.
Regarding Ukraine, Putin judged that the Ukrainian government were pro-West and hostile to his regime, and that this was unlikely to change without some external factor forcing it to. He observed the sanctions situation following the Crimean annexation and judged that sanctions were 1) survivable, 2) not likely to be elevated to the point that they risked European economic growth and energy security, and 3) not likely to be relaxed without significant concessions.
Most recently, Putin observed the Western withdrawal from Afghanistan and concluded Ukraine was an analogous situation: As he saw it, the government was corrupt, it only survived due to Western backing, and its members would flee when faced with rapid defeat (and likely execution). This would produce a power vacuum, and neither the armed forces or the civilian population would offer serious resistance to a new regime. And, presented with a fait accompli, the West would agree to recognise new government in the same way they had with the Taliban despite having fought against them for 20 years.
Based on this, he saw little downside to what he genuinely believed would be a swift and decisive operation to replace the government of Ukraine. After the plan's initial failure, he has no alternative but to try to save some face by completing the conquest or forcing an uneven armistice.
Destroying Ukraine is orthogonal to establishing a Russian digital currency. Putin is not crazy. He's outlined in great detail his problem with Ukraine, but people don't want to believe him and imagine they can find the real reason. This war is exposing that some people have no analytical skills at all and write up dumb takes. Here's another one:
Putin is Devastating Ukraine to Send the World a Message
Not sure why people think that Putin would make himself look weak delibrately. The military is failing because of years of being a corrupt state. It should not be that surprising.
I don't think this sufficiently addresses why invading Ukraine is necessary to achieve the stated CBDC goal. As Dictator-for-Life, why couldn't Putin just pull what the PRC did and just create a WeChat clone?
No, it isn't acceptable. This is a major world event that all observers find puzzling to say the least. Any analysis is worth considering. Even if it's wrong, it could put two pieces together.
As this was building up, I was thinking that the real goal was to get the SWIFT banking sanctions applied and force switching away from US-led financial system. In which case, the world isolating Russia from everyone but their friends serves that purpose, because China is one very influential such friend.
Putting the article aside for a bit: as a person with phantom nostalgia for cypherpunk, I'm concerned about the prospect of the CBDC—but I don't understand how corruption is supposed to work with that. One thing that Western commentators don't seem to fully realize is that currently the police and the agencies are given (relative) freedom to pillage the businesses, the population and the budget—and that's how they're kept loyal. The government is literally mafia. If transactions are all recorded, how is that gonna work?
A CBDC could easily impose an actually-working tax system and the budget. But I don't see how it would implement the system where the neighborhood cops take your money and split it among themselves. Even shell companies wouldn't help, since in the end money moves to individuals. The whole thing is worse for the cops than for the citizens.
The cops do actually benefit from the isolation in that they can stop pretending that they respect the ‘law’, which they for some reason vaguely kept up until recently—at least on paper. But I don't think that they want instead to have strict ‘law’ and checks among themselves.
Seems to me it could work just the way it does now: turn a blind eye to anyone on the "approved" list. Cops being on the take would be fine as long as they are doing favors for higher-ups. If they stop doing favors for higher-ups or start criticizing, bingo: no more on-the-take transactions for you.
Just because a system records citizens' transactions doesn't mean it has to record everyone's transactions, right?
56 comments
[ 5471 ms ] story [ 3921 ms ] threadCOVID would have provided a much better excuse for isolationism without sending troops anywhere. I think Russian troops in Ukraine has to be read as "Russia's rulers want to control more of that territory."
The apparent ineffectiveness may be an argument that the route to world peace is bureaucratic sclerosis and the inevitable realization of the SNAFU principle.
This is a massive understatement. It makes absolutely no sense in any way. The fact that the author thought it necessary to add some big introduction about their "source" in an attempt to add credibility in what is just some fantasy by someone who really doesn't like the idea of CBDCs is highly suspicious.
He absolutely does not need to do this thing to have total control of the population. North Korea has total control of its population without digital currency, does it not?
The fundamental way Putin has total control of his population is by having his opponents poisoned, thrown out of windows, or into prison. He has neutered the political system around him, he's shutting down independent media, it's a crime punishable by 15 years in jail to tell anything other than his story about the war, etc.
Why does he need to do anything with a cryptocurrency? He can just keep crushing and killing people.
I can't read the article but I am already sensing from the comments that it is probably totally crackers.
It's crackers.
Wait: it's a Poe? All of cryptography is a Poe.
> IK – I’ve received a guest submission from an informed source that I can vouch for (to some degree). The author wishes to remain anonymous but what I can tell you is that he runs a global technology company from the UK and has close family and assets in both Russia and in China.
Yeah, no. Nobody else would think of slipping in gosbankification. This is Izabella trolling everyone.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
He can kick out media folks for any reason he likes.
His war makes his military look weak / strengthened his opponent's resolve.
>Putin is not trying very hard to conquer Ukraine. His expensive weaponry is being held back – he is invading on the cheap with expendable conscripts and lots of shelling from close range.
I find this hard to buy into at this point.
I think more likely he is going to war with what he really has available.
* Logistics is being targeted * Russian army relies in railroads like its 1945 * Ukraine targets logistics as the well identified weak link * Ukraine is defended by everyone and everyone hates Russians. * Morale is Russian army is turbo low. They dont want to kill people who could be their relatives. * Generals on Russian side die further demoralizing them. * They realised top is using them often as cannon fodder. * Logistics company in US army is usually 4 times bigger than in Russian army per organisational unit of army. It means that US understand the war much better than Russia.
I seem to remember that this is largely based on well-known historically different assumptions between the US and Russia/USSR in case of a conflict in Europe.
US expects to fight on the ground in countries that are either allies or whose hearts and minds will need to be won. Also, US has the largest industrial capacity in the world, so they can afford to bring stuff (including chocolate and candies to give around) but they cannot afford to take stuff.
Russia/USSR expects to fight on the ground in occupied countries. Producing and bringing enough from the homeland to feed the soldiers (and the tanks) is too complicated and logistics are easy to target, so the doctrine recommends feeding from the land, aka plunder.
It's a novelty take, rather than a serious one IMO.
One thing that invalidates Your post is the logistics. You need tones and tones of material to push war effort and Ukraine destroyed rail connections to belarus and russia at the start of the war. Without good logistics you can't win war.
Other thing that is a "ps" invalidating point is that Putler commited 100% of his best soldiers to this war. Entire set of specnaz and russian marines are deployed.
So yeah, stop thinking like 4d chess are at play.
Putin going a bit mad from years of isolation is a far simpler explanation than a complex scheme involving crypto.
During the Soviet era, when there was no official exchange between the dollar and the ruble, there was a dollar-based black market. Possibly that would return (if it isn't already).
This is simply not true. We have solid evidence of attempted VDV airdrops and the VDV is an elite part of the army.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/08/vitaly-gerasim...
Anyone is expendable when you're a dictator.
Vitaly Gerasimov was the Chief of Staff of an army (41st Combined Arms), rather than the Army. The similarly-named Valery Gerasimov is the Chief of Staff of the Russian Armed Forces.
Putin's actions in Ukraine are not a great mystery, and do not require a conspiracy to impose a CBDC to explain. Putin and his circle are in complete control of Russia and Russian politics and face no meaningful domestic opposition. He has no requirement to manufacture a war or other crisis to change economic policy, no requirement to impose a CBDC to exert pressure on his population, and no requirement to exert mass control of his population at all, given his wide popularity.
Regarding Ukraine, Putin judged that the Ukrainian government were pro-West and hostile to his regime, and that this was unlikely to change without some external factor forcing it to. He observed the sanctions situation following the Crimean annexation and judged that sanctions were 1) survivable, 2) not likely to be elevated to the point that they risked European economic growth and energy security, and 3) not likely to be relaxed without significant concessions.
Most recently, Putin observed the Western withdrawal from Afghanistan and concluded Ukraine was an analogous situation: As he saw it, the government was corrupt, it only survived due to Western backing, and its members would flee when faced with rapid defeat (and likely execution). This would produce a power vacuum, and neither the armed forces or the civilian population would offer serious resistance to a new regime. And, presented with a fait accompli, the West would agree to recognise new government in the same way they had with the Taliban despite having fought against them for 20 years.
Based on this, he saw little downside to what he genuinely believed would be a swift and decisive operation to replace the government of Ukraine. After the plan's initial failure, he has no alternative but to try to save some face by completing the conquest or forcing an uneven armistice.
The crypto community is so bad about that.
You'd think some of these folks just looked outside their window for the first time and know nothing else.
Putin is Devastating Ukraine to Send the World a Message
https://eand.co/why-putin-is-unleashing-slaughter-in-ukraine...
Trust me, the world doesn't need your ill informed opinion because you have a deadline and a fan base that you need to write for
Respectfully disagree.
Its also not acceptable to downvote because you disagree.
I think a woldview that quickly realises the ridiculouslness of the premise is better grounded in reality than one that seriously considers it.
> Its also not acceptable to downvote because you disagree.
That's on Reddit. Downvotes on HN have always been used to express disagreement.
Not really. There isn't a specific guideline on what downvoting means or what is acceptable to downvote.
Some people downvote comments they disagree with, some do it for comments that don't add anything meaningful to the dicussion, etc.
Some articles are just way too wrong on a fundamental level that whatever it is they want to say is useless IMO / it's just noise.
Now I feel bad that it's been flagged.
A CBDC could easily impose an actually-working tax system and the budget. But I don't see how it would implement the system where the neighborhood cops take your money and split it among themselves. Even shell companies wouldn't help, since in the end money moves to individuals. The whole thing is worse for the cops than for the citizens.
The cops do actually benefit from the isolation in that they can stop pretending that they respect the ‘law’, which they for some reason vaguely kept up until recently—at least on paper. But I don't think that they want instead to have strict ‘law’ and checks among themselves.
Just because a system records citizens' transactions doesn't mean it has to record everyone's transactions, right?