| With the relentless firehose of news about suspicious activities on the fringes of the former USSR, it's easy to forget there's more to the region than quid pro quos and off-the-books diplomacy. There's also Kremlin power grabs, dodgy energy deals, and crippling sanctions. Istanbul-based reporter Hannah Lucinda Smith traveled to Belarus, Transnistria, and Crimea to chronicle how those factors are feeding a burgeoning cryptocurrency industry, one that has already played a part in influencing a US election. As she puts it, "In towns where communist-era murals watch over crumbling pavement, I found geeks, tycoons, and visionaries—the libertarians of the old Eastern Bloc. Tinkering with cryptocurrencies is not just about technology or money, they told me; it is about creating a whole new decentralized system, where everyone and no one has the power. It is about ultimate liberty. It is about democracy taken to the extreme." Ultimately, it may also be about creating an alternate financial system that cannot be touched by the sanctions that President Donald Trump wields like a weapon, eliminating one of the United States' most powerful levers for changing rogue nations' behavior. Cheap electricity from Soviet-era power plants, a surplus of abandoned factories, loose regulation, and oligarchs looking for someplace out of sanctions' reach to put their money provide fertile conditions for a crypto economy to take root. According to anticorruption campaigner Sergiu Tofilat, who has unpicked the threads to reveal the scale of Transnistria's cryptocurrency mining ambitions—and possible links to the hacking of Hillary Clinton's emails in 2016—"it is a money-laundering operation first of all." And, as Smith reports, the crypto boom has many tendrils leading back to the Kremlin. It may start with money laundering, but it could end with Russia establishing a crypto-fueled new world order. Jon J. Eilenberg | Articles Editor, WIRED |
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