Quote from: NeuroticFish on February 28, 2022, 11:34:21 AM

Quote from: BenjaminGlover on February 28, 2022, 11:23:22 AM

However, is this even possible? What would a Russian do in this situation? Are they able to just transfer their Rubles to exchange, purchase Bitcoin, and then transfer it to a wallet?

Since Russia banks are out of SWIFT, Russians will not be able to transfer their rubles to most of the exchanges, hence I think that they don't have much of other choices than finding other individuals inside Russia willing to sell Bitcoin for RUR.

Quote from: BenjaminGlover on February 28, 2022, 11:23:22 AM

And, if so, is it attainable? Will someone who has worked their entire lives and saved money for their family's future trust a strange technique to transfer that money to a USB stick?

Bitcoin price has quite a history of going up and down. One needs to have been reading and trusting Bitcoin for long term - the past charts show that for minimum 4 years it was usually a good investment.
But right now? No. One may need to access the money "tomorrow". Also, as I said, it won't be easy to find sellers.
Right now Russians would better exchange their fiat in any other currency. But I think that they've already missed that train too...

PS. Keeping the private keys/seed on an USB stick is unsafe. Paper or steel are better, usually kept in multiple places.

You came up with the ultimate irony, that there is currently little means for Russians to do this even if they wanted to right now. I'm not sure what Russian cryptocurrency exchanges are active but with Visa and MasterCard now banning their transactions it leaves few methods to fund bitcoin purchases. Besides that, Russians are more used to storing their wealth in dollars or gold in times of crisis - but the exchange rate they'll get right now is much lower than last week. Sadly all Russians are going to have to pay for Putin's murdering rage.