When the full-scale war started, I've seen people in the Ukrainian human rights movement that wanted to suggest boycotting Bitcoin because it can be used by Russia to avoid sanctions. I successfully argued against it, saying that Bitcoin itself is a neutral technology that can't be blamed for how it's misused, can't be effectively banned and is also endorsed by both Ukrainian society and Ukrainian government. Even in the crypto area, there were cases of crypto exchanges following the international sanctions and thus restricting relevant Russian accounts from using the funds. And without big exchanges, it's hard to move a lot of funds around, especially if you have fiat and need to exchange it for Bitcon and then vice versa. I don't think Bitcoin should be a part of the conversation about undermining the Western impact on the enemies of freedom, and in the end I don't think Bitcoin played a major role helping Russia stay afloat and finance the war in practice.
As for arguments in support of Bitcoin, I'd emphasize the impracticability of trying to restrict its usage because it's decentralized and Russia can find ways anyway, and that Bitcoin also became a medium that brought lots of support to Ukraine in the form of donations (major funds, including "Come Back Alive" and the presidential "United24" accept cryptos, and there've been major news articles on how much money was gathered by Ukraine via crypto donations).

Well, it's true that Bitcoin would weaken the ability to implement economic sanctions. I don't think it's possible to argue otherwise.

But the argument I would make is that sanctions don't only include economic restrictions. And even with economic restrictions, asset forfeitures and penalties are only part of the sanctions that could be issued. You wouldn't necessarily need decentralized currencies to implement successful sanctions and there are other ways to gut a country's economy even if they were to circumvent such measures through Bitcoin.

For example -- if the U.S. provides military aid to a country, merely withdrawing that aid would be sufficient to compel compliance. And of course, the U.S. has military holdings all over the world which direct influence over other countries.

Please consider the following.


Another interesting case.


There have been many cases like these over the years. Even the UN (united nations) has accepted cryptocurrency for many years to fund projects aimed at helping the poor in africa and abroad.

Could bitcoin's humanitarian and philanthropic trends go unnoticed by the public?

I often wonder how many people across the globe are aware of events such as these.

Bitcoin has a long history to it, even if its measured in little more than a decade.

Bitcoin was created with many things in mind but one of the most famous reasons bitcoin was created is to be an alternative currency used by humanity in purchase of goods and services and also in other transactions. This clearly means that bitcoin is money.
And having an alternative of spending money other than the Fiat money is a good one.
For instance in my local banking, one of the banks was febiting people's account for no reason. And since I had an account in another bank, I simply moved my money to the other bank and stopped using the former bank.

This is the situation with the west as you discussed in the topic. If you are stopped from using one pattern of payment, you have no option than to embrace bitcoin because it is an alternative and the representative of freedom.

Please don't distort the usability of Bitcoin like this.

Bitcoin serves everyone, every nation want to use it and it was not created to support terrorists or dictators or help any country to exploit sanctions.

If you think of Bitcoin like this, weaken the sanctions against bad countries that break world standard about freedom or any standard, please think of guns and gun powder. They were not created to kill people and to create wars by Nobel but later people use those discoveries in many different ways.

Bitcoin is the same and it can be used for many use cases and has wide usability. It can help many people and it is a biggest helpful usability of Bitcoin. Think of positive contribution from Bitcoin please. For negative effects, we can not control it and initially Bitcoin was not created to serve bad or immoral activities.

The US is the military arm of the WEF, and as such is one of the greatest enemies of freedom. Bitcoin gives us the chance to resist the banking oligarchs, who are seeking to restrict our freedom.

An exchange with your seed phrase sounds like it could be scammy a lot of attacks could take place on that as have been listed above. Remote attacks from a rogue employee on your servers could also happen.

Exchanges are prone to being hacked because they're good targets. You've left out many important details in determining if your idea is secure or not: like where are the exchanges keys stored for sending funds, where are email addresses stored to prevent against phishing, where are IDs, usernames and emails stored to prevent against user doxxing, impersonation

Why would they provide a seed phrase that's pretty risky to share a seed online or to any exchange users should only provide a public key address, not the seed phrase only the owner should know the seed phrase because if someone knows it they also have full control of their wallets. How can users trust you if you ask for a seed phrase that's too risky there is no exchange that asks for a seed phrase.

You can't change the seed phrase for a HD wallet. That's not how cryptocurrency (or at least Bitcoin) works.  If you change the seed phrase, you get a completely different wallet with completely different addresses. That will not give you access to the funds that are still stuck at the addresses from the old seed phrase.

A userID and password is something that gives access to a website.  If you operate the website, you can generate a one-time password (I assume that's what you mean when you say OTP?) and send it to a user, then when they connect to your website, you can force them to create a new password. You can do this because you control the website, and you get to choose who gets to access the website and who doesn't. You get to choose the methods that are used to access that website.

There is no "Bitcoin Company" that has control of access to the Bitcoins.  Therefore, there is nobody available to issue a OTP that will allow the user access to their Bitcoins.  If the user has permanently lost their seed phrase (or any of the associated private keys), and there is nobody else storing any of that for them then those Bitcoins are locked into those addresses forever.

So, I suppose you could store a copy of the user's seed phrase for them. Then if they forget their seed phrase, you could give it back to them, but then you are taking on the risk of storing that phrase.  If you are hacked, and the hacker gets the seed phrase, then they have access to ALL of the private keys and therefore all of the addresses associated with that HD wallet.

Just about any payment method other then handing cash to someone has a reversal risk.
So, even if they fund with a debit card 6 weeks later the funds can be pulled back. So, now you have to acquire the BTC and sit on it until you are sure the funds clear.
How are you going to handle the KYC? There are a ton of places that will do it for you for a fee. But now they have access to your site / API calls so you are at risk that way.

And so on.

-Dave

I will ignore the fact that most users are simply incapable to safely generate themselves a HD seed phrase, I will jump directly to two possible problems:

1. Working with a seed phrase online, what could go wrong? (/s)
* local malware can detect and steal that
* phishing sites looking similar to yours could steal the seed phrase
* unsafely generated seed could get in others' hands
* users who don't know what they do will store their HD seed unsafely and lose it or others get hands on it
==> all these users will most probably blame you if their coins get stolen

2. The users have the HD seed. They buy bitcoins with stolen cards. As soon as the bitcoins arrive to their wallet they send those coins further away to be sure (even if you'd store a copy of the seed those coins would go somewhere you cannot touch). Then the rightful owner try to chargeback.
==> if you're not careful enough, with this system you can easily end up giving bitcoins for free to some scammers.

Just asking you a simple question;

What do Prime trust do that you can't do as an individual?

You chose crypto because there is an option to have full control of your funds, why then would you then go ahead and put trust in a custodial service with your crypto?

I think there's likely a way to convert fiat to usdc but I don't think there's one where you can link a random user to an exchange without paying a fee (because they'd be providing the same service as you).

There's then the possibility of using systems already in defi like liquidity pools if your hypothetical exchange was considering allowing users to put up funds (on the chance the you didn't have the provisions for it). I'm assuming stripe has an api so you can confirm when a deposit has happened though.

I've been thinking about how an exchange could be made too and I don't think you'd need to "bulk" buy bitcoin necessarily as you could keep an amount of stock and provide for more later on when the initial has been taken - it generally fast to buy bitcoin either otc or via an exchange (otc is especially fast with cash deposits). 

There are APIs for that, but at that point you just become a middle-man, a mere front-page between customers and an existing exchange in the backend.
That introduces issues like heavy dependence on the service's uptime, ToS, questions about their privacy policy and more. The 'backend exchange' (Binance, etc.) will also have to make a profit on this as opposed to serving the customer directly, meaning you will have to offer worse rates.

This statement is ridiculous since miner could just mine with renewable/sustainable energy which has less carbon and it only has small impact on cryptocurrency which doesn't use PoW. Report by Bitcoin Mining Council also show majority Bitcoin miner use renewable/sustainable energy.

I believe that in a few more years, many countries will discover that, LIKE GERMANY, pursuing the dream of having their energy sources from mostly renewable sources is a MISTAKE. They are simply too unreliable.

When economy collapses, things eventually go back to normal. Have you forgotten what happened in 2008? Look it up. There was chaos as economy was collapsing (bitcoin was created during that time too) and things went back to normal and most people forgot that their centralized monetary system is seriously flawed and corrupted. Those who didn't forget started adopting bitcoin.