Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts

Saturday, March 05, 2022

Coinbase Should Stay Put And Rescue Russia

Coinbase
Ukraine Is Putin's Brexit With Too Many Dead Bodies
March 4: Ukraine
Twitter: March 2: Ukraine
Kharkiv
Putin Wants To Do A Syria In Ukraine And Can Not Be Allowed
YouTube: February 28
The End Of The Road For Putin
February 28: Ukraine
Legitimate Russian Grievances
I Am No American Mouthpiece On Ukraine
YouTube: February 27
Human Warfare Is People Coming Out Into The Streets Of Moscow In Large Numbers
February 27: Ukraine
Madman Putin And The Nuclear Sword: The Putin Regime Must Collapse
February 26: Ukraine, Justice Jackson
Hybrid Warfare, Meet Human Warfare
The Endgame In Russia
Putin Is Saddam With The WMDs
News: February 22: Ukraine

Putin has gone all in. He has gone medieval. And the thought was wars have gone out of fashion in Europe.

Wars are tragic. Even just wars are tragic. There is damage to limbs, life, property.

I think Putin is going to lose. That is for sure. What is less certain is how soon that will happen. It could be painfully long.

Putin's move feels irrational. I think this is the end of the Putin regime. It has lasted over 20 years. That is long enough.

Ukraine was the mini Russia. There was corruption, but it was still a democracy. It was building a market economy. Singapore was the mini China. Deng Xiaoping had the humility to learn. Putin's hubris has beem to bomb.

The Soviet Communist Party vacated the scene. Now it is the KGB's turn to go.

I think the number is 500,000. If half a million Russians were to brave the streets of Moscow, Putin is over.

A democratic Russia should collaborate with the US to cut nuclear weapons by more than 90% by the end of the decade.

Russia is a major power. It will be a major power. But the currency for power these days is how your economy is doing. Russia naturally will have a sphere of influence; every large country does. But that influence respects the sovereignty of the small countries in the neighborhood. Trade, not war.

Putin is not fighting the US. Putin is fighting China. Putin wants China to think it is Russia that is the number two country. That has not been true for decades. It is now China that competes. And China competes primarily economically.

A debate has flared up. What should crypto companies do? Several arguments can be made both ways. But I think one big argument for staying put is that if ordinary Russians can upload their assets on to the blockchain, they can vote with their feet. Or even if they stay, as most will, the Russian rouble weakened will politically weaken Putin.

And there is also the aftermath. The post-Putin scenario also has to be worked out. The last time around the West did not do a good job of helping Russia transition. The price for that is being paid three decades later.

YouTube: February 19
New York Times: February 16: Hong Kong, Omicron, Trump, Bhutan
February 12: Russia, Ukraine, Lead
If Russia Invades Ukraine, Questions Arise Over Taiwan





Crypto Is Helping Both Sides in Ukraine Conflict, But It Won’t Wreck Russian Sanctions . Several days after the Russian invasion, Mykhailo Fedorov, vice prime minister of Ukraine and minister of digital transformation, called on people around the world to show solidarity with Ukraine by making crypto donations. ........ At the time of writing, donations have exceeded $50 million. ...... It shows individuals collectively having a state-like impact on the global stage. ....... This new way of accessing global private capital is a refreshingly welcome facet of cryptocurrencies. By going straight to the people of the world, Ukraine’s government has been able to raise finance quickly without the need for financial intermediaries. ......... They also have the potential to help Russians to evade the crashing rouble ........ One leading Twitter user, David Gokhshtein, replied that he is “definitely with Ukraine and for peace but we don’t do that in crypto.” .......... Changpeng Zhao, founder of leading exchange Binance, has said that it’s not the place of crypto exchanges to restrict Russian activities in general, though he emphasized that his exchange was not permitting any of the hundreds of wealthy Russian individuals on western sanctions lists to use its services. Even then, he said, it was impossible to stop them because there were so many other exchanges that they could use instead. ........ Russian demand for crypto may help to explain rising crypto prices early last week too. ....... Countries such as Iran have previously been accused of using bitcoin to bypass sanctions. Nonetheless, as the global community looks ever more fractured by ideology and past grievances, concerns about Russia are of a different order. .......... In my view, however, it is doubtful that crypto will save Russia from sanctions. Even apart from the huge task of establishing the necessary facilities within Russian banks, many of the people and institutions that would be receiving the crypto would need to set up wallets of their own. Besides that, daily transaction values in crypto only amount to a few billion dollars. This is a big number, but an order of magnitude less than the overall financial system. If Russia were to seriously start using crypto for payments, the market is not yet mature enough to cope. .......... thanks to the devaluation of the rouble, bitcoin has now eclipsed it in overall value.

It is now the 14th most valuable currency in the world, three places above the rouble.

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Saturday, January 09, 2016

Friday, May 09, 2014

The Chinese Are Coming

English: The Bering Strait, separating Siberia...
English: The Bering Strait, separating Siberia from Alaska in the North Pacific. NASA image, taken by MISR sattelite Deutsch: Die Beringstraße: sie trennt Ostsibirien von Alaska und verbindet den Pazifischen Ozean mit dem Polarmeer. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Beijing to the US by train: China outlines plans to connect world by high speed rail network
The 'China to Russia plus the United States' line proposed by the Chinese Academy of Engineering would start in the north east of China, travel up through Siberia, across the Bering Strait to Alaska and down through Canada before reaching the contiguous US ..... a link to London via Paris, Berlin and Moscow, along with a second route to Europe following the silk road to reach as far as Germany via Iran and Turkey ...... A fourth Pan-Asian line, connecting China with Singapore via Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia, is reportedly already under construction. Proposals for lines running from China to Africa are currently being drawn up ..... The most structurally ambitious of the proposals is the US-China link, which would require around 200km of tunnels to cross the gap between Russia and Alaska - four times the length of the Channel Tunnel. .... China already has the technology in place as it will be used to connect the country to Taiwan by underwater high-speed train requiring a 150km long tunnel.
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Friday, October 12, 2012

Cyber Pearl Harbor Will Be From Stateless Entity Like Al Qaeda


The Al Qaeda simply does not have the brain power, or it would have done it already. They have no qualms. They do not deliberate, hum and haw. They just don't have the capability.

But the cyber Pearl Harbor will not be enacted by some state, not Iran, not China, not North Korea. It might not even be an organization like the Al Qaeda, however loose. It is more likely to be a group whose structure is akin to the group Anonymous. All members are faceless and anonymous.

But that can not be mistaken for acts like that of Wikileaks. Or Kim Dot Com. Releasing secret State Department cables is not Pearl Harbor. Pirating movies is not Pearl Harbor. And there will be legitimate cyber developments to weaken the nation state and empower the individual, the global citizen. That would be a welcome development.

But a Cyber Pearl Harbor by definition would have to be an act of evil. 9/11 was the modern day Pearl Harbor.

Panetta warns US could face ‘cyber Pearl Harbor’

Maintaining watch on Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, and especially the Al Qaeda makes sense, but room has to be made for a new hitherto unknown entity.
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Sunday, November 21, 2010

Brazil: The Largeness Of A Country


Some countries are huge geographically but minuscule in population: Canada, Russia, Australia. Brazil is not one of those. Its large presence on the map is matched by the people who populate that map.

Saturday, July 17, 2010

I Am Big In Canada


An image is worth a thousand words, so let me not elaborate too much. This map above is based on the traffic to this blog this past week. The major countries seem to be as follows.

The Germans Called Me Robin Hood

Canada
United States
United Kingdom
India
Brazil
Mexico
Australia
Germany
Japan
South Africa

Sergey Brin's Is The Right Stand

I got Brazil and India but not Russia and China.

A 4 AM Traffic Peak, Mostly From Canada
Traffic: Canada Top Country, 2 AM Peak
What Just Happened? 3,000 Page Hits

The page hits for yesterday stand at 2,000 and for today so far stand at 1,000. So I guess that 3,000 hits a few days back not an aberration. That 3,000 could be my new daily floor.

Weekends tend to be slow for bloggers in general. People read blogs when they are at work! So 1,000 for a Saturday is good, it is like getting 2,000 hits on a week day.

My Secret Sauce

If you want to know how to do this, this is my attempt at a formula.

Blog Traffic = (Number Of Total Posts)*(Number Of Inbound Links)*(Frequency Of New Posts)
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