💬 "Ukraine-Russia, Sanctions, Crypto/Bitcoin Effect, Big Tech Response, Information Battle"

Hosts: Jack Butcher, Bilal Zaidi & Trung Phan
Category: 💬 Opinion

Podcast’s Essential Bites:

[2:05] TP: “Over the weekend, some things about the global landscape have completely changed. […] These will never go back to the way they were. So number one is obviously disconnecting Russia from the global economy. […] BP is withdrawing its 20% stake in Rosneft, which is one of Russia's largest oil players. Uber is trying to sell its stake in the equivalent of Uber in Russia. […]. Russia was removed from the financial system, essentially, from Swift, their central bank assets have been frozen.”

[2:50] TP “European countries [are] significantly affected. Germany is a huge one, because Germany for basically the last two decades [has been] very reliant on Russia energy. And they have basically not found a way to bridge the Russian energy and this green economy that they're trying to move to. After Fukushima that shut down all a lot of the nuclear reactors […], [which] was their green future potential. […] Their […] initial reaction to the Ukraine crisis was, […] are we sure we want to have a hard hand because we're so closely tied to Russia? And basically, after a few days, it became clear they couldn't hold that line. They had to cancel the Nord Stream II project, which was a natural gas line from Russia.”

[4:39] TP: “Since World War Two, the world has not wanted to militarize Germany, for obvious reasons. […] So Germany has had this pacifist stance similar to Japan, but they announced over the weekend, [that] they're going to go above the NATO spending requirement, which is 2% of GDP on defense.”

[12:28] BZ: “The first casualty of war is the truth.”

[13:30] TP: “[Two stories that] went viral that are [most likely] not true. The Snake Island [where] 13 soldiers […] said, go f* yourself to the Russian Navy. They are still alive. […] This is the fog of war where, […] it's the most primal part of our brains […] just looking for something to latch on to. […] [Another example is the] Kyiv single jet fighter from the Ukrainian Air Force, which apparently took down 6 to 10 Russian jets. That footage turned out to be from a video game.”

[41:18] TP: “Twitter does not have a physical presence in Russia. […] They've been putting warnings on all Russian official communications. […] Facebook has also been throttling […] Russia Today and Sputnik, which [are] the state outlets or stayed back outlets. YouTube has demonetised and down ranked the algorithms for these sites. […] Facebook doesn't, for example, want to shut down Instagram, because a lot of the regular citizens that […] didn't want to be involved in this, that's their way to communicate. But then Russia itself is shutting down, or throttling access to Twitter and Facebook for obvious reasons. They're trying to control the information environment. So big tech in a sticky situation that they've been in with these authoritarian states for a long time now.”

[42:55] TP: “The big thing regarding the crypto exchanges was the Ukrainian government asked as part of the broader sanctions package […] to not allow any Russian citizen to trade, buy, sell their crypto assets, so to freeze them. So Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance, they all came out […] and said basically, […] if they're being asked to sanction an oligarch's account, they're doing it. But they're not shutting off the entirety of the country.”

[47:06] JB: “There was a huge catalyst for the value of Bitcoin over the course of this conflict in the last few days. […] People [are] moving out of a currency that is attached to a nation state that's doing insane shit and moving into politically neutral money. […] Code is neutral. […] To even be in a position where everything you've ever worked for can be completely obliterated overnight, that is, I think, a human rights issue. And I think the most eloquent advocates for Bitcoin, in particular, have made great cases for that. And you can’t empathize with that when you've been sitting in the most privileged currency and environmental and societal status your entire life. It's just not something that crosses your mind. But South American countries have gone through hyperinflation. And there's countless examples where people have moved into Bitcoin to protect their wealth.”

Rating: 🚀🚀🚀🚀

🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify | Google
🕰️ 54 min | 🗓️ 03/02/2022
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