EU is going to experience a major energy crisis due to Russia's war, so it would make sense for them to limit their energy use, including limiting non-essential large scale energy use. And since most of the population doesn't use Bitcoin, and banning mining in EU won't even stop Bitcoin, I can totally imagine some restrictions on mining in the future. But maybe they will ignore it if it's not a big issue for them.

Russia is not a superpower. It is deeply corrupt at every level of society, it doesn't have any significant technological progress in any sphere, mostly it is just living off the remnants of its Soviet legacy. Its economy was built around exports of fossil fuels, and now the West is focused on severing this tie. Putin's war has revitalized NATO and heightened the global geopolitcal tensions, so there won't be any repeat of WWII scenario with Putin doing whatever he wants while the West trying to appease them. We're already past that. Russia won't emerge stronger, it will just get rolled back into the state it was in the early 90s.

Putin always hated Ukraine, back in 2008 he told that Ukraine isn't a real country, that it was created by the West artificially and that a large part of its territory belongs to Russia by right. And in his video published days before the war the talked about historical borders, Soviet Union and Russian empire, so you get the picture. Putin has unchecked power over Russia, and he doesn't care about human lives, neither Ukrainian or Russian, so his intention is to conquer Ukraine and enter Russian history as one of its greatest rulers.

Yeah, I was so seriously anti-NFT before the war, but now when my country used it to get the much needed funding, I'm going to soften my stance, lol. I still think it's just a fad that will disappear or become marginalized, but I can no longer say that it has no practical uses. If these donations will help save lives, it will offset some of the harm caused by NFT scammers and money launderers.

The amount of Bitcoin volume happening in both Ukraine and Russia is not significant enough to affect the price. The biggest thing that can happen is the use of Bitcoin by these countries influencing the decision on crypto regulation made by the West, since they are the economic powerhouse. Bitcoin used to avoid sanctions by Russia = more Bitcoin restrictions; Bitcoin used to help Ukraine = more favorable regulation.

Your calculation is wrong, because that's just storage for one copy of a human brain. The whole point of blockchain is to store the same data duplicated on many computers to have no single point of failure. So in this case you'd need to multiply this number by thousands or tens of thousands.

But why would anyone want to store a human brain on blockchain? Blockchain is only good as an append-only live database, not a general use database.

If you live in one of the countries that is allied with Ukraine, you can already support Ukraine financially without much obstacles. What crypto offers is the ability to help Ukraine from anywhere, even from Russia where doing so will get you imprisoned for 15 years. And second, using crypto allows sending money much faster and having a much wider choice of recipients than more official channels.

Okay, let's imagine all billionaires sell all their assets and buy Bitcoin, then what? The whole point of being a billionaire is to own business that keeps increasing their wealth. Bitcoin is obviously not a business, it's a volatile and speculative asset. I can only see billionaires using Bitcoin to hide a small portion of their wealth. But they already have offshore bank accounts for that.

Satoshi wasn't the only person who used bitcoin in 2010, and it's really not surprising that the amount is large by today's standards, because back then it was a small amount, so maybe someone found their old wallet. If Satoshi tried to dump, it would happen on a much larger scale.

Visa and Mastercard don't process international payments with Russia, but they still process domestic payments, so it's not as devastating as it may seem. There are so many payment methods in the world, that I'm sure those in Russia who are motivated enough will find ways to send and receive money abroad.

Sorry  but it's bullshit that ukraine lacks financial services or payment methods and that people turn to bitcoin. In most of the country you can pay with visa/Mastercard cards, thanks to Ukraine's law that all small businesses must install cash registers. And all Ukraine's banks still function with little disruption. But cash is a must have if you are moving through rural areas or active warzones.

I have a theory that the Anonymous group is just a front for western governments to have plausible deniabiliy when they launch cyber attacks against Russia. After all, if they openly admit to it, it would be a notable escalation.

That's until the authorities turn their eyes on Bitcoin. Border control could spot the most obvious methods of storing  coins, like crypto apps on phone, hardware wallets, unencrypted flash drives, but another problem is what to do with bitcoin once you are in foreign country. Exchanging btc for fiat in a foreign country in a p2p way could be risky for a refugee, who in case of Ukraine are only women and children.

Sadly, despite billions in damage, the destruction is just starting. Russia's strategy is completely leveling whole cities, towns and villages, in order to terrorize the government into signing Russia's demands. And Ukraine is defending itself as best as it can, but it can't match Russia in open field, and its air defense can't cover and intercept everything.

Russian currency got hit very hard due to sanctions, but Ukraine's currency performs relatively well, considering the war, it only dropped by 10-20%, something that happens often in crypto. Ofc in the long run bitcoin will outperform any national currency, even if countries don't experience war, but the reality is that most people aren't tech savvy enough to convert thir savings into BTC, and in Russia it could be extra hard if exchanges and payment systems sanction them.

Upwork and a few other freelance platforms announced today that they will ban Russians. So banning of Facebook is gonna be one of the last problems for Russian workers. If sanctions will keep mounting, Russia will be as isolated as Iran and NK, so fleeing will be the only hope for ordinary Russians to experience the pre-war life.

I will talk from my experience from Ukraine - cash is king, you don't know where will you be in the next day and if local stores accept digital payments or not. Gold is quite illiquid on practice, and it's more prone to theft than crypto which can be hidden and secured with encryption. So Bitcoin is quite a good store of value, if you know what you are doing.

I think the biggest problem is that Bitcoin is in a bear market, and people  dump it because there are more lucrative opportunities at the times of this war, like oil or gold. If Bitcoin was in a bull market, the safe haven narrative would have been much stronger.

Bitcoin does not exist in a separate world from fiat, and since fiat is the dominant currency, no one is really going to calculate prices in a highly volatile currency like Bitcoin first. The closest thing to what you are asking is various crypto to crypto markets, like tokens or NFT, since all the deals happen in crypto, and you can see that the prices often remain stable even if the broad crypto market experiences rapid price changes.

Decentralized exchanges are only good for casually exchanging small amounts, not for professional trading and big operations. DEXes still rely on traditional financial system for fiat payments, there's no way around it. So, without centralized exchanges Bitcoin market and price discovery simply won't exist.