Bitcoin is a good option for us (regular people), the governments want to have full control but they can't control anything about bitcoin. That includes the price which is volatile and that makes it a less desirable option for big trades.
But a gov-coin or CBDC is basically the same as fiat, they can control everything about it just like the existing banking system.

The amount I mentioned above was the total in multiple countries not SK alone ($7 billion in SK), and it is not a "story", there has been a long conflict over this money for the past 4 years and they still haven't given it back simply because US doesn't let them!
This is for example part of this long drama last year:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2021/02/24/south-korea-agrees-to-unfreeze-1-billion-in-iranian-assets-following-tanker-seizure-by-tehran/

Evidence suggests that you can. Take United States for example, according to what CENTCOM commander Gen. McKenzie told the House Committee on Armed Services a year ago, US hasn't had air superiority in countries they are occupying for the past years. That's all because of the drone threat they are facing, and we are talking about primitive drones like Qasef that poorest countries like Yemen use to hit US bases occupying their country not even the advanced ones owned by Iran such as those with artificial intelligence.

That's just media putting a magnifying glass on a normal thing that has been going on for a couple of years. Considering the fact that Iran has been mass producing modern weapons, export has always been one of the plans; ever since the UN arms embargo was removed in 2020 the Iranian advanced weapons have been sold in global markets. For example earlier this year in Doha International Maritime Defense Exhibition in Qatar, the Iranian made AD-200 long-range air defense missile system was present among other things (the selling point was the US stealth aircraft right across the hall that the system had shot down the previous year!).
Or the drone production line that was installed for Tajikistan to help them fight terrorism in the region using the multi-purpose Ababil drones.

As for this particular news it's hard to say if it is true unless some evidence comes out.
- On one hand the media has been filled with a lot of nonsense lately (like the recent thing about Russia needing the Iranian satelite to spy on Ukraine lol). Neither side has either approved or rejected these claims.
- On another hand there has been a military relationship between Iran and Russia (clear from things like the naval drills over the past years in Indian Ocean and soon in North Atlantic Ocean). Also considering that Iran's drone industry is leaps and bounds ahead while the airforce is behind in regular manned planes, this could be true and about a swap (Shahed family for Sukhoi technology).

Bitcoin is a part of economy and it is affected by what happens to the economy as a whole, inflation is only one many factor.

Also there is a huge difference between inflation having an effect on bitcoin and bitcoin price directly following US inflation rate to the point that the numbers reported change the bullish/bearish state!

I also think the method is too complicated. Compared to writing the randomly generated words (12) inside a book that you carry across border may be a simpler option. Worse case scenario is storing an encrypted version of it on a cloud server and retrieving it after crossing the border.

I also can't help but think methods like this where the user has to be the entropy source all share the same weaknesses that humans are not a good source of entropy. You know that there is a good chance that someone is going to choose a weak pattern and have their coins stolen.

Some opposition does not mean al-Saud is going against the boss. They have seen some weakness and have been trying to capitalize on it to maybe get something more from the deal. For example they get closer to China and Russia to oppose the fact that US stopped fully backing them in their genocide against Yemen or suspended F35 sales. They also know that even if US wanted to invade an oil rich country they would never do it at the peak of energy crisis at home.

Oil output is the same but also it is about the capabilities. Ever since Aramco was hit, they haven't been able to fully rebuild it which is why they can not increase oil production despite being ordered to.

They still haven't fully opposed the colonizers which is why when they cut the heads of more than 30 people 10 of which were children, you don't even hear a word of it in the news or from human rights foundations!

I disagree with this because of how Saudi Arabia works. They are super rich but they heavily depend on imports due to lack of self reliance. All it takes to topple the regime is to sanction them. Basically see what happened to Iraq when they were sanctioned right before the invasion (a million died of hunger each year!) and multiply that by 100.

They know this very well which is why they try to keep the balance between opposing the boss and obeying the buss.
They have no military power to stand against US either. Their coalition couldn't even finish the poorest and weakest country in Asia called Yemen for 8 years.

Price has been going up and trying to reach $25k and break it for the past months, it has been failing and coming down to try again. It is not soaring yet as long as it hasn't broken that resistance. You don't seem to have looked at bitcoin charts in the history and at times like this when a sideways market is in full effect. Which is why you try to find unrelated reasons for a very normal and common market behavior.

I'm not a military analyst but I don't think Russia wanted to use its planes because losing a pilot is too expensive a loss to risk it. Any other asset (except maybe big warships) could be replaced (ground troops, tanks, radars/SAMs and their operators) but a pilot can not be easily replaced.
This is why I've always said the future wars is fought with drones not people.

I said components that includes a lot more than just electronics and majority of it is manufactured domestically. You should be more specific about what part for me to say if it is manufactured domestically or not if the information is public.

P.S. economy is not down the drain the exchange rate is and that's because of the printing spree that the previous presidents were on

I disagree with your opinion.
Because the effect of rising inflation on bitcoin should be positive where people buy the only hedge against inflation which is bitcoin. But we saw how when inflation went up a lot of them panic sold their bitcoins.

The reaction was also not to the inflation rate but mostly to other markets (like US stock market) that crashed hard.

There has not been any "soar in price" for the past 2 months. You are confusing sideways market with price soaring.

The correct statement is "there cannot be more than 21 million bitcoins in cicrulation". Otherwise right now there is 19,118,390 bitcoin in circulation according to block explorers and some of it is lost.

It can but it won't because it requires a major change in the protocol which nobody would agree to.

When one entity starts buying something and removing that from the market it creates supply shortage. That will lead to increased price. In simple terms if a government started buying up bitcoins they would run out of fiat and paper to print more fiat way before they reach 21 million coins. 1 satoshi could be worth $1 million!

You should ask who would even sell their bitcoins to the government in first place. I have some bitcoins, do you think I'm gonna sell it all to the government?!

The main goal is to abandon US dollar as trade/reserve currency rather than being to circumvent sanctions since there are a million ways of doing that already.

In fact there was a press conference last night with some additional information which I try to translate here.
Basically I'd say the goal is providing a much better alternative to SWIFT with real security considering any money sent through SWIFT can be stolen by SWIFT! For example for the past couple of years about $7 billion of Iran's money is stolen by South Korea through SWIFT and they are refusing to give it back.

"The goal is to replace LC with smart contracts using the blockchain technology (without needing a third party) to handle payments for import/exports and have better guarantees from the other party. Basically replacing SWIFT."

From what I understand there is going to be a domestic centralized exchange where miners could deposit their bitcoins (apparently not limited to miners only). They can either sell it there and receive fiat or CryptoRial or credit for imports through the provided channels.

The target for imports is said to be "places where mining and using cryptocurrencies are common" naming "Russia, India, China and South East Asia".

The article still didn't mention what cryptocurrency was used or whom was the $10 mil trade with.

People like Schiff will never turn to bitcoin for "freedom", even if they some day buy bitcoin (if he hasn't done that years ago) is going to be because of the profit that the rise could give them. It is all about their mentality, Schiff is a stock broker and cares about market movements and the profit he can make from that not about how he can get out of the centralized banking system.

Of course. I dare say from day one nobody wanted to use USD for their trades but they accepted it for difference reasons while trying to get rid of it ever since.
Even Europeans dumped it at some point the first time they realized US has betrayed them and broke the promise about dollar being backed by gold. It even crashed the dollar price. In a short time however US forced them into petrodollar and revived dollar again. But they don't yet have any new tricks up their sleeves today to replace petrodollar with.

I don't think it can expand globally though. I mention the new world order here many times but in this order US and the dollar isn't going to go away, it just isn't going to be dominating. US still has a lot of colonies, from Saudi Arabia to Europe. They are asking "how high" when the order comes to "jump". If for example al-Saud barks too hard, they are going to be invaded and turn into a worse version of Afghanistan and US would simply take over all their oil.

They import it from other countries that are manufacturing those "really important things" and haven't placed Russia under sanctions.
Or buy it through a third party
Or do what Iran did and become self reliant... As the country with the most number of sanctions against us we have a saying that sanctions are an excellent opportunity. Basically anything that is sanctioned is manufactured domestically and with high quality. And that's a lot of things from medicine field to agriculture.

Iran is manufacturing plane components and is replacing whatever market Russia lost:
https://simpleflying.com/iran-supplying-aircraft-parts-russia/
China is apparently another alternative:
https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/31344-chinese-companies-ready-to-deliver-aircraft-parts-to-russia

They are somewhat traced when they find their way into the black market!

Liquidity is not a problem, each of these digital currencies are as liquid as the governments want it to be. They are also in their early stages so you don't see them much or hear a lot of news about them. But they are doing fine, for example the Chinese one surpassed handling $10 billion worth of transactions a while ago.

IMO the problem so far was that the countries could not agree on what to replace USD with. Each country prefers using their own currency and make that dominant. But this has some problems like the fact that countries could print their own currency as much as they wanted and as long as that is not backed by anything it becomes problematic (what US has been doing) and we'd be back where we started.

This has been changing though. Both SCO (China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, India, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Iran) and BRICS (China, Russia, India, Brazil, South Africa and Iran) are made to ensure that happens. BRICS already announced the replacement this year. Unfortunately there hasn't been enough details about it.

Back in April I made a topic that was in a way my speculation about the future specially the part about possibility of Atomic Swaps. I didn't post the second part of the speculationthere:
I basically speculate that the USD replacement is going to be a bunch of cryptocurrencies created by each country and backed by what that country can offer. For example CryptoRial could be backed by a combination of gas and oil since Iran has the largest reserves of those. Venezuela's Petro could be backed by oil and maybe gold since they have both (mostly oil). Same with other countries, go with what they have which is either energy or gold.
These cryptocurrencies could be used to trade with each country independently and without needing a middle man like SWIFT that could ban or sanction a country stealing their money. The exchange rate would be fixed to the backing commodity.

P.S. Keep in mind that we are talking about changing a world order that has been in place for decades. It will take a long time, specially since the existing "order" resists being replaced.

There are two sides with two extreme/unrealistic views on the situation. One side says that the increased energy prices means West is going to freeze to death and the other side is saying that the shrunk Russian economy is going to starve them to death.

The thing is that this is a war, an economical war between East and West. They are hitting each other and the damage is seen on both sides. Interestingly enough nobody analyzes things like this. For example they say Russian imports have gone down by $X but they don't say that these imports were coming from the West and that means the Western exports have also gone down by $X. They also don't mention that Russia can find replacements for most of those imports but EU for example doesn't have the same option.
Take Siemens for example. The company can not find a replacement to sell their turbines to but Russia can find another manufacturer elsewhere.

The responsibility of a full node is to download and verify all the blocks from the start until the last one while enforcing consensus rules. What database that node uses to store the blockchain and the related data is not important at all. In other words LevelDB is just one of many possible key-value stores that could be used to store the bitcoin related data such as the chainstate.

That is not how one bypasses sanctions. If a country is giving in to the US sanctions they won't trade with Iran with or without cryptocurrencies. Not to mention that Iran already has a lot of energy exports to all its neighbors regardless of the sanctions!
For example regarding energy, recently a new contract was signed between Pakistan and Iran to export an additional 100 MW electricity to Pakistan on top of the current 104 MW. Between 200 to 1200 MW is also sold to Iraq. That is on top of exports of gas and other stuff.

$10 million is too tiny in $10 billion monthly exports that Iran has! It is also probably with Russia and using Iran's CBDC called Crypto-Rial.

The thing about sanctions is that they have turned into a double edge sword that has been cutting the wielder more. For example when US sanctioned Venezuela they also harmed their own oil industry since it was the Americans who were running the Venezuela refineries who had to accept the billions of dollars in losses when they exited. Guess who is involved in those refineries today?

The funniest thing that I learned recently was that during US maximum pressure against Iran (still ongoing) they claimed they would decrease Iran's oil exports to zero, US navy has been running and depending on the fuel that Iran have been selling them. The same navy they try to threaten Iran with

Unfortunately this whole news is based on a very vague tweet and the media went nuts over it

My guess is that this is either about using bitcoin considering the fact that for a couple of years there has been talks about using bitcoin (earned from mining) for imports and there has been rumors about it being used.

Or there is a higher chance that it is Iran's CBDC called CryptoRial which was supposed to start operating this year and a little more than a week ago the Russia’s State Duma showed interest in using it.

You have an exaggerated view of what bitcoin can do to a country's economy. It can not do any of that, it won't guarantee increased GDP and income, or decreased unemployment, etc. Bitcoin will certainly open some new doors but it is not going to perform miracles. Big improvements in the economy of a country needs big changes in basic economic matters.

For example in Iran we've adopted bitcoin years ago and it has been used for import/exports and about 10% of the hashrate is in Iran. But none of it is the reason for the changes in the economy.
What is improving the economy is everything else, like the changes in the banking system that forces them to invest in infrastructure and production instead of what they were doing before which messed up the economy. Changes in the exports where oil is not the main export, a lot of other things are and even oil is not going to be exported but oil products are. The destination of exports have also significantly improved.
All that is helping inflation decrease, employment increase, GDP to go up,... not the adoption of bitcoin.