Russia Gets Orangepilled

With the news that the West (particularly the US) has banned Russia and Russian banks from the SWIFT system, it seems fairly obvious that Russia got orangepilled hard. Blockworks has a post up about how Russia thought it had $600 billion in foreign reserves… until it didn’t. And a lot of rich Russians thought they had money, until their accounts started getting frozen and seized. That is having the entirely foreseeable consequence of driving a ton of interest into cryptocurrencies. Yahoo has the news on that.

In a recent Musings, I thought that the Canadian government’s financial repression against truckers and their supporters would lead to a spike in interest in crypto, especially decentralized crypto wallets. Now we have an entire country of 145 million people finding itself deeply interested in decentralized crypto wallets… or at least its own non-US, non-Western monetary system. More importantly, a lot of rich people all around the world (including those in the West) are watching with grrrreat interest on what happens to Russian oligarchs and their wealth, kept in Swiss bank accounts and in luxury real estate all over western nations.

An unexpected side effect of the Russian misadventure in Ukraine will be the explosion of crypto globally.