On Fri, Mar 07, 2014 at 08:07:53AM -0500, dan@geer.org wrote:
That's almost as good as the hypothetical game big (insert your boogeyman here) might be playing with Putin to make him think Bitcoin is a NSA/CIA operation to ruin the ruble.
A person of my acquaintance who is a first wave negotiator in international affairs (first wave meaning the deniable precursor labor that occurs before the image-sensitive political class gets visibly involved) recounted how, in discussions in Beijing, this person's counterpart from the "other" side said that it was the assumption in Beijing that Twitter was an American operation constructed to destabilize Iran.
This was three years ago.
--dan
And just like Iran, it seems to be all about dead dinosaurs http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/03/putin_ukraine_and_en... It had somehow slipped my mind how 'theoildrum.com' went away, and everyone seems to have forgotten $12/MMBTU natural gas. But now we have a global power play that involves exporting every MMBTU that can be fracked and liquified to choke off Russia's economic air supply. Expect $15/mmbtu gas if we have another polar vortex and $8 corn in 2015 or 2016 if this holds. When I ran across http://oilgascoin.do.am/ (oilgascoin crypto coin) I thought it was a sad attempt at a copycatcoin, but it's looking more like the first sign of a cryptocurrency psy-ops arms race.