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Tell me you don’t have in-house counsel without telling me you don’t have in-house counsel

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Crypto exchanges are refusing calls to freeze Russian accounts. A Binance spokesperson said doing so "would fly in the face of the reason why crypto exists." Kraken's CEO said the move would violate bitcoin's "libertarian values." vice.com/en/article/7kb

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Oh my. I think I'm an idiot but I actually did not have "crypto bros violating sanctions" on my how-will-crypto-die bingo card. I mean. It's obvious that they'd do it. Their response is exactly what is to be expected. I have failed.

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The current sanctions don't require them to freeze account of Russian citizens in general, only certain people and organizations. All they're really saying is that they'll comply with the law but won't do anything above and beyond that to try to support Ukraine.

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The SWIFT ban itself is only for certain Russian banks, not all Russian banks in general. That and the rest of the sanctions have been misrepresented in a lot of headlines. The sanctions could be a whole lot stricter than what they've put in place or announced is happening.

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I've been seeing a lot of the same takes — the UA govt put out a call to halt business (and likely other orgs) but no western exchanges (at least as far as I've seen) are outright flaunting any new sanctions from their country of operation. I mean, beyond their baseline posture…

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I think most businesses are only going to comply with sanctions instead of going above and beyond. It's not clear that it's the smart thing to do in every case. I think businesses would do more informing Russian citizens about what's going on than cutting off ties with them.

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Provide information on what's going on with all your products, services, etc. I don't think freezing the accounts of all Russian citizens somehow convinces them to push for regime change, if that's the goal, and that sounds like an extremely dangerous goal to have honestly.

11:31 PM · Feb 28, 2022Twitter Web App

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The point isn't to make the ordinary russians revolt. I think the sanction targets indicate that the goal is to make the russian elite prefer a Russia, where Putin took an unfortunate dive out of a window. They can then pull out, accept whatever deal they get, and blame Putin.

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I think it's clearly Putin's dictatorship running the country, not the oligarchs. I don't think Putin cares much about the rich losing a bunch of money. I doubt there will be a palace coup caused by sanctions. I can entirely believe they can cause a messy popular revolution.

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