Be a Soldier, Endorse Fiat
English-speaking Bitcoiners generally didn’t accept my piece “War and Lightning Network.” Some reviews underpinned struggles to understand the post’s central message. There, I tried to critique a neutral or positive attitude to policies limiting foreign military help to Ukraine. That attitude stems typically from small entrenched groups who disagree with mainstream narratives. Putin’s propaganda always looks for specific socio-economic pain points for internal or external purposes. All sorts of conspiracy theories could accompany such an attitude, and there is no way to make a point to conspiracists.
Knowing who Mr. Putin is and how broad and outnumbering his propaganda network is (he has lots of fiat money funded from his pocket oil companies), I was always trying to support even radical Ukrainians until rather overextended anti-Russian policies have yet to become challenging to me personally. While working with the Simple Bitcoin Wallet codebase, I stumbled upon the commit that not only removed Russian translation but contained a direct threat for quite a broad group of people to which I belong. To be clear, I have no problem with somebody not supporting Russian translation in the app. However, I instantly remembered another example of a Ukrainian developer who quit developing Electrum Wallet fork for Dash and became a “Bitcoin developer”.
While such a direct threat may not be dangerous to users, there is one little fact about Anton Kumaigorodskiy, a developer who did it. Before the war, he was a big fan of Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin. For me, such a committed message sounded a bit dishonest. There is probably no Russian occupant who read Sorokin. He was so precise in describing Russia’s yet-to-become future that freshly formed pro-Putin youth organizations banned his books long ago. But while this funny detail has no meaning in the present, another interesting observation exists. When Anton returned from the frontlines and resumed communication in Telegram chats with even amplified skepticism about the Lightning network, resulting in the deprecation of it in Simple Bitcoin Wallet, he openly admitted that Bitcoin has failed since the only usable payments were conducted in various fiat electronic payment systems.
Ukraine is among the countries trying to adopt CBDC ahead of the others. Similarly to Nigeria, it has already approached the phase of a “ban on crypto.” Despite that Nigeria has failed spectacularly, Ukraine, as a state, receives foreign help and will likely continue pursuing its e-hryvnia plans. Finding off-ramps into hryvnia is already much more complicated, although it was much easier in March 2022. The official narrative is that crypto donation helps pro-Russian terrorists finance operations from inside the country, and recently, policies forced Kuna to leave the country. But this is not true. Chainanalysis demonstrated that pro-Russian organizations receive much less financial help than, for example, Ukrainian funds, which received 100x more. Ukrainians have many other things to do right now, but paying attention to “crypto.” However, my contacts suggest that for many, even seemingly insignificant help, right in time may be necessary in many ways.
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