As someone who was born in the USSR and spent considerable effort trying to figure out why the West made it so much better, I think this is very superficial. B

As someone who was born in the USSR and spent considerable effort trying to figure out why the West made it so much better, I think this is very superficial. Bank accounts are being frozen because currently it is an efficient way to instill fear into anyone thinking of supporting a similar protest in the future. If you eliminate the banking angle, there will be always others. In Russia, they can void your parental rights and send your kids to an orphanage where you won't ever see them. Back in the 80s USSR they could declare dissidents legally insane, forcing them to undergo "experimental treatment". Further back in the 30s, they would just send an unmarked operative car to your apartment and take you for questioning at 3am, after which you won't ever return. These are all the symptoms. The real problem is the centralization of power. Russia was formed by centrally managed conquests, while many Western countries emerged as a compromise between equally powerful entities as early as 800+ years ago [0]. There's no trick to it - people only respect law if their opponents respect it as well, both knowing that the alternative (mutual destruction or an exhausting fight) is more expensive. In the peaceful times, power is mostly an economical thing. You wield power when you own/control products that others depend upon. In a small closed community with a couple of farmers, a few local groceries, small banks, local factories, breweries, etc. the power is distributed. If Alice decides to not sell corn to Bob, he can always go buy it from Carol. This got disrupted by information technology, where Alice and Carol got outcompeted by Mike owning a grocery chain, employing minimum wage employees that decide nothing, and using the leverage to negotiate better prices with the suppliers. It also had a side effect of transferring the power from both Alice and Carol into Mike's hands. As the lower interest rates fueled more mergers, the power became consolidated in fewer and fewer hands. So currently there is a shareholder class getting their income from the capital gains, and the rank-and-file class, working the corporate jobs. There is also a dwindling small business owner class that finds it harder and harder to compete in a market where selling goods below cost fueled by endless capital is just fine. The shareholder class holds most of the power, owns most media companies, and is using it to facilitate further transfer of wealth from the employee class (e.g. the move from owning suburban houses to renting corporate-owned condos). The rank-and-file class and small business class appear to be fighting each other over invented identity issues, pushed by the corporate media, and fail to recognize how they are both being robbed by the corporate class. I don't think using distributed ledgers to hold your savings/pay for your expenses will solve the underlying problem. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta