Ukraine is, slowly and painfully, gaining ground
That doesn't seem right. In 2023 they actually lost more ground than they gained. At least that was the situation until this september, but i don't think there where significant developments in the last 2 months.
Is multisig such far from being practical yet?
It is not. See this comment of mine on reddit and fluffypony's answer: https://old.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/17m6w9e/psa_ccs_wallet_incident/k7mj2he/
Speculation makes it harder because it causes price volatility, which is good and bad. There are services like bitrefill, travala and coincards that make very easy to buy almostanything using crypto. Of course if somebody accepts crypto directly i prefer them.
I've been living on cryptocurrencies only for the last >6 years. Buying groceries, travels and whatever else i need. So yes, people do that. You don't hear about it because people are too busy talking about speculators and price movements.
Cryptocurrencies are seeing high adoptions in country where banking is limited, in the rich country is 99% speculation.
Does anybody seriously think that Russia or Belarus would gain anything by attacking a NATO country? It doesn't make any sense at all. This is just a government trying to use fear to gain consent. Which is the way of doing politics of the last 50 years.
Lol. "Banks are good. Except those giving banks services"
The main appeal is the ability to make transactions without intermediaries. The problem is that most people have as the only interest to get richer and richer and there will be always other people happy to sell them that dream.. For a fee. These are the vastmajorituy of the people in cryptocurrencies, but that doesn't disreguard the power and utility of the technology. It's easy to shit on the tool, but the real problem is the greed-driven society we live in.
The dollar is the favourite currency for that stuff. Cryptocurrencies are meant to take power away from banks and give it to the people. Sure, the vast majority of the people use them for spsculation, but that doesn't make the technology useless. It's just that people are mostly interested in making as much money as they can. That's a society problem, not cryptocurrency's.
If that would have been the case, the moment the body was given to the mother we would have seen photos of his "beaten up" cadaver on every newpaper in a matter of minutes. Instead we only got minor articles saying "the body was given to the mother" and that's it. I know this goes against the current "everything that goes against Putin is true" way of thinking, but creating conspiracy theories based on wishful thinking only helps Putin make his points against the "western propaganda".