RT has the article Russia & China hatch sanctions busting plan to limit use of dollar.

Amid a worsening stand-off between East and West, Russia and China are increasingly contemplating using their own currencies in mutual settlements and finding ways to work together to counter sanctions, Moscow’s envoy in Beijing has disclosed.

There cannot be many people in the world who have any significant economic power that are not aware of this effort. Putin has been quiet in bruiting this about of late just in case the Biden administration is asleep at the switch, and thinks the USA can impose sanctions without the USA paying an unaffordable price.

Maybe the sanction threat comes from the same Biden administration that thinks that putting five thousand troops in Europe is a sufficient threat to counter the 170,000 troops that they say Russia has at its border with the Ukraine. Is there anybody in the USA that is not laughing at Biden’s troop “build=up”?

Democracy At Work has the podcast All Things Co-op: Blockchain and Cryptocurrency.

In this episode of All Things Co-op, Kevin talks to blogger and podcaster “The Blockchain Socialist” about the possibilities of blockchain technology as a mechanism for worker cooperatives and the Left. Though often tied to cryptocurrency, blockchains can also function as a means to enable cooperatives to maintain data sovereignty, to engage with various economic actors outside of traditional capitalist structures, and to enable scalability while retaining democratic governance of enterprises. Though blockchain is not going to fix every problem, it does offer up many interesting opportunities to shift away from centralized, hierarchical capitalist institutions.

This podcast has many useful ideas in it. I do find it frustrating all the time spent telling me what they are going to explain before they get around to explaining. A lot of this is abstract, so it sill leaves some things to your imagination. Eventually the cryptocurrency part may fall away, but there may be useful things that come out of the technology.

The 21 million bitcoin limit may be an attempt to mimic the rarity of gold. The problem is that the creation of a new cryptocurrency is easier than forming a new element in the periodic table of elements.

One of the websites mentioned in this podcast theblockchainsocialist.com